alt Hacker NewsLinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down.
I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection!
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My last 2 companies, LinkedIn asked me to add an email address associated with the said company and actually confirm via said email in order to add them to my profile. So, if I worked for FooCompany, I had to have a @FooCompany.com email which is setup by someone at the company itself. Does this not cover what you're talking about?
> got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn
That it requires you to buy your buddy a drink says it all. They should have taken the general issue to their higher ups, fixed it for you and then bought you a drink. Or dinner, on LinkedIn's dime.
> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
It isn't at all a neat solution, but you could maintain a list of users on LinkedIn that are authorised to speak for your company, linked prominently on your profile with a warning that anyone else claiming to work for the company is likely a scammer but LinkedIn offers no way for you to stop them claiming to be part of your company.
If that became a common pattern it could highlight how much of a scammer paradise LI can be and maybe they'd be more likely to do something about that particular vector.
I know it is only a partial solution, but I saw with some companies that LinkedIn provides a way to verify a user works at such a company. This is done via sending an email to a company domain email address (supposedly yours that you provide), and then approving it from your work laptop. I guess the administrators of the company account on LinkedIn can determine which domains are allowed for this.
The only way this could be abused is if the administrator accounts on LinkedIn itself get hacked and temporarily other email domains are added to the whitelist (or if an approved user themselves got hacked on LinkedIn [or their work email for that matter]). These are all the usual vulnerabilities in any system.
I understand that it would be too extreme to only allow users to claim they worked at a company if this verification is done, but maybe putting a warning if you get a message from a recruiter/someone that has not verified they work at their 'present' company could go a long way (instead of right now tucking away the verified logo quietly on their profile page).
> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
I had the opposite problem: my company name was equivalent to the owner of an online casino. It took me a year to figure out that the enormous amount of spam I was getting about ‘guest post placement’, and people contacting me about deals was because Linkedin put me among the list of the casino employees. As I was Director of my company, I was the most valuable prey for business spam.
I fixed the problem by deleting my account, but now I’m in all the shittiest of spam lists for eternity. I don’t know how do they even harvest emails from Linkedin.
I had it several years ago when I was running my own one-man consultancy [ie: self-employed] ... somehow I'd managed to have six or seven people on LI claiming to work for the same company.
Reported them to LI and nothing was ever done about it. Eventually the accounts disappeared as I guess they were either shut down or repurposed.
>I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn
I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.
> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.
I remember getting an office manager, working from Dubai (I think), for my one-person, basically nonexistent company, working from my living room, in New York.
She may still be there. I never bother checking into LI, except making an occasional post, every few months.
I was looking for people who I had worked with at a company that was acquired 15 years ago, and some random person claims to be the CEO of that company.
I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?
LinkedIn doesn't have any redressal mechanisms for anything. Someone I knew went through a lot of abuse by a LI user and kept making new accounts to harass. LinkedIn's response - "We did not find anything that violates our ToC". No wonder it has become a cesspool of spam, fraud and abusers.
LinkedIn didn't even disavow people pretending to work for LinkedIn until someone had too much fun with it - https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...