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LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, and like other sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, it’s attracting various types of scammers, fraudsters, and even spy agencies.
They are creating fake LinkedIn profiles for various reasons; I tried to cover those reasons in my article “Top 11 Reasons Why Fake LinkedIn Profiles Exist.”
And now I want to share with you several tips for spotting a fake LinkedIn profile.
1. Fake Photos
Often, you will come across a profile that is using the picture of some well-known actor or maybe of someone you have seen many times on the internet. Does it ring a bell? You need to be smart and understand that fake accounts use pictures of others to make themselves prominent, so beware if you encounter such a profile. Report it.
The best way to check profile photos is via reverse image search methods. If you use a Google Image search for a reverse search, you can get information about who is in that picture, if that photo is real. However, in recent years, Google Image searches have not been as effective as image searches using Yandex, TinEye, or Bing.
My biggest surprise was when I found out that the HR team in one company created a fake profile that was operated by three people and they were using fake profile photos of attractive women to lure IT specialists into giving out their email addresses in order to receive job offers. When I asked the CEO of that company why they were doing that, this profile disappeared and next day they started using a new one.
I have even encountered several profiles that used profile pictures of different nationalities to get a better response from potential candidates, or they used profile photos of different genders as they were expecting to get more responses.
In the past, people behind these fake profiles used several pictures from the internet and when people started using reverse search engines to check out those pictures, they started using the photos in grayscale to make them hard to identify. But due to modern technology they’ve just started using generated profile pictures from This Person Does Not Exist and similar sites. There are several ways to spot fake profile photos, and Nixintel has…
