LinkedIn has detected and removed more than 58 million fake accounts and over 90 million spam and scam messages recently.
Job seekers are having a hard time to trust on LinkedIn because of the presence of scammers on the platform. The recent community report shows that they have detected and removed almost 58 million fake accounts and over 90 million spam and scam content between July to December 2022.
Suchi Desu, who was laid off from a tech company, said, “Trying to find a job while others are losing theirs due to layoffs isn’t an easy feat, and it doesn’t instil a sense of security in the job.”
Then she started looking for employment opportunities on LinkedIn but due to the surge in fake profiles and spam messages on the platform, she is sceptical about the authenticity of the recruiters.
She added that fake profiles usually do not have detailed descriptions and they do not engage with other posts using likes or comments.
LinkedIn has stopped 44.7 million fake accounts at registration and has restricted around 13.2 million accounts before the members reported them. In addition to this, more than two lakh content were also restricted by the platform after its members reported about the same.
The community report also shows that LinkedIn has removed 99.3 per cent of spam and scam content with its automated defence system. Around five lakh such content were removed after members reported.
Anil Rachamalla, chief executive officer and founder of End Now Foundation, a non-profit organisation advocating for better internet ethics and digital wellbeing said that every social media platform has its own issues and LinkedIn is also not a very secure platform.
On LinkedIn,most users are educated and could be earning more than an average Indian and that makes it a bigger issue.
Criminals collect data and do all kinds of social engineering crimes by acting as if they are officers, bankers, or different firms.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech industry has witnessed mass layoffs. Layoffs.fyi, a real-time layoff tracking platform shows that so far, 586 tech companies have laid off 1,70,549 employees in 2023.
On October 25, 2022, Oscar Rodriguez, the vice president of product management at LinkedIn said in a blog post that they are rolling out new features and systems to counter fraudulent activities on LinkedIn and to keep it a trusted professional community.
The new features include an ‘About the profile’ section where it shows when a profile was created and last updated, along with whether the member has verified a phone number and work email associated with their account.
Other features include detecting fake accounts using AI-generated profile pictures through their new deep learning-based model and adding warnings to some messages that include high-risk content that could impact our security.
