Here’s a quick tip that may help you spot a fake Linkedin profile. Last night, I was checking my LinkedIn account and saw I had an invitation to connect. After checking the person’s profile I decided to accept the invitation. It looked real enough, having several jobs, education and skills completed. The only red flag was the lack of endorsements, especially as the person had over 500 connections. After I did this though, I did a quick Google search on the person’s image and was really surprised to see 5 other LinkedIn profiles used the same image. Eeek. One block and report later and that connection was history.
When you accept an invitation to connect, you are sharing an awful lot of personal information with the other person. For example, your contact information can only be seen by 1st degree connections. Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but on some of the freelancing sites such as odesk and elance, people are being paid to harvest your personal details. The only way that they can do this is by being connected to you. Spotting a fake LinkedIn profile isn’t easy, but a quick way to check is to right click on the person’s profile image. Next select “Search Google for this image”. Google will then display all instance where that image is used. A real person may use the image across different accounts, a fake person will use the same image across different accounts.
Next time, I’m going to do this BEFORE I accept the connection. Lesson learned.
Karen, great tip, thanks! I have been startled by sudden increase in such fakes that I have been getting in past few months. And yes many do have a lot of connections, although presume that is because some folks have automatic acceptance on LI connection requests. Had not thought about checking image, been basing it on the write-ups profile problems, so this is really helpful!