Fake LinkedIn Profiles Are Impossible To Detect

From a report: Don't trust everything you see on LinkedIn. We created a fake LinkedIn profile with a fake job at a real company. Our fake profile garnered the attention of a Google recruiter and gained over 170 connections and 100 skill endorsements. Everyone is talking about fake accounts on Facebook and fake followers on Twitter. LinkedIn hasn't been part of the conversation, but Microsoft's social network also has a big problem. We created a fake profile and connected it to a real company. Sadly, it isn't hard. LinkedIn doesn't ask for any proof or confirmation of anything. Instead, LinkedIn runs on a sort of honor system.

You can say you work for a large company and give yourself an impressive job title. It worked for us. Our fake profile (John) "works for HP" as an Innovation Technologist. You may think that's a job title we made up on the spot, but it's a real position we found in HP's job listings. We also gave John previous jobs at Exabeam and Salesforce to round out his resume. You might imagine that HP or someone else would notice and stop us. But that's not how it works. LinkedIn doesn't notify companies about new employee profiles. We didn't steal anyone's identity or even use a real photo for our fake profile. See that photo of John? That's not a stock photo of a real person. Instead, the image came from thispersondoesnotexist.com. Simply put, it's a fake photo of a non-existent person generated by a computer algorithm.

Hardly

[nospam007]

_Real_ profiles are hard to detect because of all the fakes.
Everybody I know has a profile there, even though none of them know that site and never visited it.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Fake resumes are a thing, too.

Re:

[Darinbob]

I get tons of recruiters. What I don't have is 100 skill endorsements. How does a fake account get that unless the fake account added them? Is this fake person actively going around and bugging people for endorsements, something that real people don't like to do?

Re:

[Cederic]

A lot of people will reciprocate if you endorse their skills. So acquire a few contacts, endorse their skills, admire their diligence in recognising yours.

Re: You could, I dunno, CALL some of the reference

[Anonymous Coward]

And all 3 references, Joe, Bob, and Dan, all "former colleagues", are really just the person that set up the fake profile, each with their own unique VOIP number that all direct back to the same phone. Just answer it each time with a slight alteration to voice and personality. Let's see how far we can take this!

Re:

[war4peace]

Does it matter? For a technical interview, the person is either skilled or not. Easy. And for a non-technical position, we all know the person needs no skills anyway :)

deception will be uncovered

[liquid_schwartz]

You can do this at first, maybe even get some interviews. However eventually the deception will be revealed and any offer rescinded. This would only work for very low level positions or very small companies that might skimp on a background check.

Re:deception will be uncovered

[doubledown00]

You can do this at first, maybe even get some interviews. However eventually the deception will be revealed and any offer rescinded. This would only work for very low level positions or very small companies that might skimp on a background check.

You'd think so. But then...... [marketwatch.com]

I'm also personally aware of at least two county medical examiners that lied on their resumes claiming degrees they didn't have. And some instances in the Dallas - Fort Worth area where politicians lied about their credentials and were elected anyway.

I don't disagree that the deception is (usually?) discovered.......but it's not always that fast and it's certainly not limited to "low level positions". Alas lack of due dilligence (i.e. laziness and being baffled by bullshit) can be found in many places.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The CEO (Marcie Frost) of CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the United States with $320 billion in assets, lied about her experience and college degree even though she was vetted by an outside company. It took a journalist to expose the fraud. The worst part is she kept her job.

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[Solandri]

After the Challenger disaster, investigators vetted the entire assembly and testing process. One of the things they discovered was that NASA had two, sometimes three people inspect separately inspect the same parts if they were deemed important or critical to safety. The idea being that multiple eyeballs on the same part were more likely to notice a problem. The net result of having multiple inspectors actually turned out to be that problems were less likely to be detected. Each inspector would assume o

Re:

[tomhath]

I've seen offers rescinded or people hired/fired with fake resumes a couple of times. But I've also suspected a few co-workers had gotten away with it. Bottom line is that there's really no consequences for getting caught; just keep trying until you get in the door.

Re:

[Darinbob]

Probably true. If you're caught out for lying and get fired, the company policy is usually to refuse to answer any questions about former employees except to acknowledge that they were indeed employed and for how long. So you can strike out 9 times and still look golden when you interview at the 10th location.

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[drinkypoo]

You can do this at first, maybe even get some interviews. However eventually the deception will be revealed and any offer rescinded.

Fake LinkedIn profiles might not be a good way to get a job, but they could be a good way to make your profile look more credible, by being linked to them. You could use them as references, etc. Few people will verify your references' references...

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[Darinbob]

Ha, I've seen cases where in the first week it's realized that we made a huge mistake. Sometimes it's a month or two later when we figure out that the new employee just doesn't measure up and it's been hidden because everyone assumes the employee is still just learning the ropes. How some of these people got through the interview process is beyond me, but some people do sound a whole lot better on paper than they really are, and some can even get past technical questions.

Ok, I can give some reasons - terr

Re:

[Narcocide]

Yea, if you were trying to get the job, it would be a stupid and short-sighted plan.

If you were just trying to permanently ruin someone else's ability to get any job ever again though, this is a nearly fool-proof way to accomplish it. Thanks LinkedIn!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No different from a resume

[green1]

Linkedin is a resume site. And it behaves exactly like a resume does. There's nothing at all stopping you from putting all sorts of fake stuff on your resume too.

Thing is, once you get to the interview, they'll probably want to call your references, there's a good chance they'll want to see actual certificates if they are relevant to the job, or perform an aptitude test, etc.

Sure, people have bluffed their way in to jobs in the past, and it will continue to happen in the future, but it's hard to see this as a real emergency when it doesn't allow anything new that wasn't exactly the same in the past.

Same as your CV

[enriquevagu]

So... You can lie in LinkedIn, same as you can lie in your CV?

Almost, but not quite, entirely fake

[WoodstockJeff]

It's hard to tell what's real when it's all fake.

Given the number of times one of our automated processes gets asked to join someone's LinkedIn group, we've started blocking all invitations from them. Even telling LinkedIn that any one submitting the address is either incredibly needful of friends or just being crooked doesn't help curb the volume.

The real shock is that people find this shocking

[MobyDisk]

The real concern here is that there seem to be people who implicitly trust what they see on the internet.

I can see why this is so tempting

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Mostly because even if it's fake you don't have to actually be able to do what your profile says, you just have to be able to bullshit your way through the interview. (My experience on interviews is that most interviewers are terrible at finding real ability versus falling for bullshit. Just make sure you can talk for 5 minutes about SOLID design and they'll fall for it.) Once you have the job, you only have to seem good until you jump to your next job in 1-2 years which isn't anywhere close to long enough for a decent number of people to figure out you couldn't do the job anyway. (What I've seen is it takes around 3 to 4 years before anybody in management can figure that out since they don't work with you daily anyway.) Damn, I'm so jaded.

Gotta Get me some Skill Endorsements

[David Mitchell]

Faking the rest is easy, how'd he get all the skill endorsements? I guess I should really just get out there and start trading endorsements if it's that easy to get an endorsement from someone who doesn't even know you.

Fake info on the internet? Stop the presses!!

[registrations_suck]

I don't understand why this is news to ANYBODY.

Vetting? Background checking? Yeah. They're real things.

So what?

[iggymanz]

I could submit fake resumes to website, or mass mail them to companies. People have done that, even collaborating with friends who will give fake references. Of course, the fake person in this article is not going to be going to any interviews, but just a little diligence on the part of the interviewer can spot the phonies who never worked at claimed places, or who are claiming some position they never held.

I'm reminded of a woman I know who was scammed by a guy claiming to be a pilot (back in the days wh

Erm ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... so fake resumes are possible?

Well yes, Mr. snark, but now ... (in 2019) ... on the internet!

Of course they have fake profiles.

[doubledown00]

Just don't assume it's "job hunters" who are creating them. Sites have been caught using bot profiles before to entice people to sign up for "premium" services (anyone remember Ashley Madison?).

And not just big companies.

[coverclock]

For years I've made a good living doing contract product development - mostly writing embedded software in the telecommunications domain - in the U.S. through the auspices of my one-man S-corporation which has existed since 1995. Imagine my surprise when LinkedIn asked me if I wanted to connect to another employee of my company. I've never contacted this person. And of course it's vaguely possible that a company with the same name exists overseas (the person claiming to be an employee lives outside of the U

Skill endorsements

[damn_registrars]

I am a real person (or at least I'm pretty sure I am) and I don't have 100 skill endorsements on linkedin. My profile has been there for over 6 years, too. Apparently I need to link up with more influential people to increase that score?

Are they any more bothersome

[nuckfuts]

than the real profiles?

For the very first time

[holophrastic]

This must be the very first time that anyone has ever lied on their resume.

Summary of post

[camazotz]

"LinkedIn is not sufficiently draconian or Orwellian. It is not sufficiently malevolent and is not taking advantage of the available big data that would let it codiy and screw its "users" (cattle) over." I think that's what TFA was trying to say.

What, pray tell, is a "fake" profile?

[shanen]

My ontology of primary identity problems (followed by solution approaches):

(1) An identity that falsely claims to have certain positive attributes.

(2) An identity that falsely impersonates a real person.

There are (obvious) solution approaches to both of these problems. I'll start with (2) because it's easier. An impersonation only matters to the people who know the real person. Therefore a challenge and response strategy is sufficient. I would prefer that LinkedIn implemented it as part of the "Connect" req

Re:

[shanen]

Time is already past 1.0 o'clock. Sad the promising topic died so completely.

I should have included something to address the story more directly in terms of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It should also be part of a useful MEPR system.

The universties don't help

[ukoda]

I had what I strongly suspected was a fake profile reference me on LinkedIn. I tried to see if I could prove it was a fake based on the publish information so LinkedIn could delete it. Most of the info was generic and non-verifiable. One step I tried to perform was to verify his university qualifications. I emailed the university in question asking for confirmation that a person with his name graduated with the claimed degree in the claimed year. The university emailed back that they could not tell me

Fun fact...

[zawarski]

... It was originally going to be called circle-jerk, but the domain was taken.