Tag: linkedIn scams

LinkedIn Phishing Scams

LinkedIn is the social media network for business people, with over 500 million subscribers.

Generally, users trust LinkedIn more than the other social media services as it has had more real content, less advertising, people behaving better e.g. not posting offensive material and so on.

However, scammers have noticed that people trust messages from LinkedIn more than say from Facebook and aim to take advantage of that.

Scammers may send messages claiming to be someone interesting, but commonly they hijack accounts and use them to send what appear to be genuine messages from real people.

Protect Your Account

  • Limit the contact information on your profile – do not include sensitive information such as home phone number or address.
  • Don’t click on suspicious links – links in any unexpected message should not be clicked on.
  • Think carefully before accepting a connection request from anyone you don’t know in the real world. LinkedIn is great for building a network, but you must know who’s in it and whether they are safe.

Phishing messages are now very common on LinkedIn. These are where the sender pretends to be someone you would trust e.g. a LinkedIn worker or someone from a large well-known business.

They try to con you into giving away key information or financial information or enough personal information to sell to other scammers and identity thieves.

 Warning Signs of a Phishing Message:

  1. Messages containing bad spelling, grammar, and that aren’t addressed to you personally.
  2. Messages asking you to act immediately.

Common message titles include:-

  • Subject: Account Suspended
  • Subject: LinkedIn Closing & Termination of your Account
  • Subject: LinkedIn Profile Security Alert
  • Subject: YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE TERMINATED

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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LinkedIn Scams

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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