DXBtoDOH

Last night while chowing down at some Korean place here in Doha a LinkedIn request popped up on email from some HR consultant. Thinking it's a recruiter I automatically accepted it (I get contacted by recruiters fairly often).

This morning I look at the profile. Some strange dude in the US. Photo shows a Russian city in the background with lots of onion domes. Very weird non-Russian name. His current location is one American city but the current job is listed in another American city (there's about a thousand miles between the two). There's a few other bits that don't make sense. Why is this HR consultant for a major US shoe manufacturer contacting me in the ME? Start to think it's a fake profile for some reason, and he only has eight other connections, all from scattered places and occupations mostly in Europe.

I had to go out to a meeting so it wasn't until just now that I attempted to delete the profile when I discover it's already gone. When I go to the original email invite, the link now leads to a 'Sorry, this profile couldn't be displayed.
This may be due to a change in the status of the profile, or some other issue.'

Weird. But worried about hacking. You think something might have happened? Data stolen? Virus?

Meow

There are loads of weird fake profiles on LinkedIN which is why you should never accept anyone without at least looking at their profile to see if it looks real. It's for data fishing I believe.

Many claim to be with real companies but have just one position listed and a fake photo. Fake profiles can be reported so in the case you mentioned I assume someone checked and reported them.

I get recruiters trying to link with me every week, plus, somewhat surprisingly, a load of financial sales sharks who are clearly using a scatter gun approach and hoping mugs will connect and then succumb to their fake patter.

DXBtoDOH

Yeah. Learned something here.

Guess I was feeling too desperate to get out of Qatar to not due my due diligence on a prospective recruiter hitting me up

archie159

As Meow says, there are loads of them - some weeks I get 2-4 fake connection-requests (they seem to come in waves, several in one week & then none for a few more). Most claim to be headhunters or recruiters. Another thing to look out for is a "too good" photo - 9 times out of 10, a reverse image search shows that it has been pinched from an online magazine or from a company website in a completely different country. I have reported loads of them to LinkedIn, but they very rarely bother to shut them down. I've seen stats saying that something like 30% of the LinkedIn accounts are fake (don't quote me on that figure, but whatever it was it was very high indeed) - but LI doesn't seem to want to shut them down too energetically, maybe as its business model requires them to have ever increasing user-numbers.

IKnowNothing

Also, be aware, that unscrupulous people - from debt collectors to "recruiters" to "Nigerian chappies including the Wealth Managers", use LinkedIn to find out a shed load of personal information on you, where you work etc. etc.

Their security isn't good, that's why I have a very basic profile, doesn't say my surname, my education, my picture, but does say where i work.

scrubbedexpat141

I connect with people to get their email addresses so I can contact them. Some have mobile numbers as well.

I have 27,359 connections in total (been working on reducing recently as I think the cap is 30,000). So in theory, that's 27,359 people I can withdraw into a mailing list and contact very easily.

If 3% were daft enough to fall for a scam that paid me $200 then 820 would reply and cough up...even removing 30% are fake it would still be 574 people which is $114,800.

No wonder there are so many possible fake profiles.

mission

not on Linkedin...but I get enough requests to connect via my company email address...which is given on our company website

weasel decentral

That's a crazy number of connections. How many do you actually know of that amount, 1-2,000?
I try to keep connections to people I have at least met or spoken to on the phone but even so I imagine that I don't really know about 30% of them.

scrubbedexpat141

I recruit in so many different places that it's my first port of call.

If I asked you to think of rail experienced project managers in Sydney, you might know one or two or none...I can give you (hang on) 3,182 and contact details for 480 of them.

That means I can contact 480 people tomorrow morning (if needed) and get my hands on those suitable, or those suitable that these folk may know...who aren't on Linkedin etc.

It's a tool for me to do my job rather than an actual network to keep in touch with work folk.

I honestly don't think we could recruit in the number of places we do, from here, without it.