LinkedIn is a business social media network with over 500 million members. LinkedIn profiles show a lot about you that is of use to scammers. If scammers find a way to connect with you, they have an easy way to send you email and generally people are more trusting on LinkedIn than other social media networks.

There are two common types of scams that involve LinkedIn.

1. Emails that appear to have come from LinkedIn. Fraudsters ask the recipient to click a link within the email to accept the invitation or to view the sender’s LinkedIn profile. The links within these emails are often to another website and these may be scam sites ready to download malicious software to your computer.
2. Requests coming from LinkedIn members. The fraudster creates a LinkedIn account. With the fake profile, the fraudster can then send LinkedIn connection requests. These invitations arrive in the LinkedIn inbox, which makes the request look less suspicious, especially if the criminal has been successful in connecting with a few other people that you may know or who may be on your contact list.

Pointers to a Scam

• The sender has very few connections
• The sender’s profile is mostly blank
• There are numerous misspellings and grammatical errors
• The photo is not of a person but is a graphic or a logo or something meaningless
• The sender’s job title typically makes them an executive at a bank or other financial institution

If you accept a connection request from one of these scammers, the only value is that it makes their profile look more legitimate as it now has a larger number of connections . But what the scammer wants is to talk with you online, pull you into their fraudulent world and steal from you.

If you regret having agreed to a connection, you can block it and if there is evidence of fraud then pass that on to the LinkedIn authorities so they can stop the account.

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