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Tell HN: Banned from LinkedIn for Reporting Wickr Drug Spam
It made the news recently that Wickr (Amazon owned E2EE chat app) is full of illegal imagery.
I read about this on my LinkedIn feed then decided to search for "Wickr" there to see who else was talking about this. The search returned dozens of spam messages offering drugs in Asia and the US with information to contact on Wickr for price.
I reported these drug spam posts to LinkedIn - which is supposedly an anonymous report.
Next day I got a flood of reports on my own comments (nothing to do with that topic), so many I didn't bother to appeal as I had other things to do. Few hours later my account was down.
Seems that for retaliation the drug network decided to find me out and use their accounts to subvert LinkedIn's policy and ensure I can't stop their spam. They have new spam up now while my account is gone.
No good deed goes unpunished I guess.
- thestepafter 4y agoSo you are saying that on LinkedIn if you report something the owner can see the name of who reported it?
- Nextgrid 4y agoThey shouldn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if the people that are supposed to review the reports are bribed or compromised. I'd imagine it's outsourced to the lowest bidder, as customer service & moderation typically is in any big/scummy company.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jrumbut 4y agoYou can often see who viewed your profile. There probably weren't too many people viewing more than one of their profiles.
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoOf all the social networks, I never would've guessed that LinkedIn is the one people turn to when they want to sell drugs.
- rajamaka 4y agoRampant drug use really would explain some of the bizarre "hail corporate" content that gets produced there.
- blitzar 4y agoYou dont have to be on drugs to do linkedin - but it sure helps.
- onion2k 4y agoDrug dealers are very entrepreneurial, and are often excellent at identifying underserved markets. It appears LinkedIn users are such a market.
- koboll 4y agoWhichever social network doesn't sufficiently moderate is the one people will turn to when they want to sell drugs. If you have a sufficiently popular CRUD, and you don't go our of your way to stop them, bad actors will leverage it to do crimes. It's that simple.
- imgabe 4y agoAdderall, Modafinil, cocaine, there's probably a big market on LinkedIn if you're peddling the right drugs.
- retSava 4y agoLinkedIn is closer to Facebook imo. The subreddit /r/linkedinlunatics is pretty funny, and also a bit scary. It's pretty interesting actually, on facebook you see people show off a manufactured persona that is always laughing, on vacation in exotic or glammy places, and on LinkedIn it's the exact same phenomena but the success indicators are different. I'm still a bit clueless on the whole LinkedIn influencer thing though. Is there some monetary gain from that? I don't think they have the same possibilities for eg ad space or sponsorship as eg youtube or blog influencers, so perhaps it's more a personal vanity thing, or selling books and courses. </rambling>
- 4y ago
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat did you search?
- wildernesscat 4y ago"wickr" I suppose. I see those ads too.
- moneywoes 4y agoAny screenshots?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thereare5lights 4y agoIt's not surprising. LinkedIn has been shady from the start. People shouldn't forget that they used to scrape your contacts from your email account through some sneaky user flow that got you to give them your email password.
- jjbinx007 4y agoThis is the main reason I will never use LinkedIn. Context: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae726fe1462 https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
- encryptluks2 4y agoI always set my LinkedIn at the max privacy. I deleted my LinkedIn account over 8 months ago. I still get spam from recruiters in my email that uses my LinkedIn name which is different than my real name. LinkedIn definitely does not follow privacy settings.
- ratww 4y agoAlso lots of companies are mining data from Linkedin and building email databases. As soon as Linkedin knows I switched companies I start receiving a deluge of spam on "guessed" emails (first_name@company.com, first_name.last_name@company.com).
- izhak 4y agoIf that's true then: 1. Either LinkedIn is hacked by drug mafia 2. Or drug mafia has people inside LinkedIn But first thing - you should share you full report that you've sent to LinkedIn. You don't risk outing yourself - since mafia already knows your account.
- na4ma4 4y agoI wonder if more those accounts have pro and can see you viewed them recently, probably multiple accounts are owned by the same groups so when they get a report on a bunch of posts they simple map "who looked at both profiles".
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoThey don't even need LinkedIn Pro btw, they just have to turn Private Mode off. If you let other people see that you viewed their profile then LinkedIn will let you see who viewed your profile. So yeah your theory seems most likely unless OP had Private Mode turned on for his profile (then they wouldn't be able to see that he saw their profile regardless of whether or not they have LinkedIn Pro).
- anshumankmr 4y agoIsn't that a bug? If you report someone,the person should not be able to see who reported them, right??
- wruza 4y agoTechnically they aren’t. Like when you visit a site, other sites cannot, oh wait…
- usrn 4y agoAll this counter-intuitive crap is why I don't ever even open LinkedIn.
- iso1631 4y agoMy ESTA ran out shortly after covid started, and I didn't renew it until Febuary this year. Shortly after putting in for it, my linkedin reported I had a visit from a "Law Enforcement professional from the Washington-Baltimore area", which I thought was amusing.
- londons_explore 4y ago
- ungamedplayer 4y agoAre you concerned now that illegal enterprise now knows your details and can possibly retaliate? Are you easily doxable ?
- ratww 4y agoAt least they know where OP works. Or maybe not anymore since he's banned from LinkedIn.
- Nextgrid 4y agoCreating a new set of LinkedIn accounts to spam with costs much less than taking an online feud "offline" where the risk is much higher and could include "jail time" if it goes wrong. He'll be fine.
- ungamedplayer 4y agoI really hope so.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoGood to know, makes me consider closing my account myself. Linkedin always had a bit of a scammy feeling to it. Especially when it comes to recruiters' spam messages.
- andrewstuart2 4y agoI got surprising results sending canned messages back asking for basically a 50% salary bump over my current. Never followed through but at least one person said "I can do that."
- quickthrower2 4y agoWill try that!
- rhizome31 4y agoI did that maybe 10 years ago and haven't had a single opportunity to regret.
- bencollier49 4y agoI mean, by definition you wouldn't. You'd just be worse off without knowing about it. Not saying LinkedIn is great, but..
- woadwarrior01 4y agoI did that 10 years ago when they got hacked[1], later recruiters from two FAANG companies even found me without it (The first found me on Github, and another through a referral) and I worked for a couple of years at both companies. Like you, I'd thought I had a good run without it. More recently, I noticed that some of the people who were way junior to me earlier in my career, are way ahead of me because they were strategically switching jobs every 1-2 years. After speaking to some of them, the common factor turned out to be LinkedIn, and I begrudgingly rejoined it in January. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack
- eVeechu7 4y agoUsing LinkedIn is never a good deed.
- hgazx 4y ago
- Robin_Message 4y agoYou ever pick up someone else's litter in the park?
- micromacrofoot 4y agohow much are you getting paid to make this comment
- braingenious 4y ago
- ratww 4y agoEducational images of drugs definitely aren't illegal, but OP is clearly talking about advertisement for illegal drugs in image format.
- braingenious 4y ago
- ratww 4y agoIn the real world there is stuff that is illegal and some of those things can be in image format. And the part that sucks is clearly the retaliation from whoever it was.
- braingenious 4y ago
- ratww 4y agoIllegal can have multiple definitions, and some advertisement can be illegal. No, it's not a shame. Mocking someone because their wording is imprecise is a bit shameful, though. Also against the HN guidelines. You can do better.
- braingenious 4y ago
- hutzlibu 4y agoHumor is fine and accepted here - but in your pedantic mockery, I couldn't find something to laugh.
- Krisjohn 4y agoA placement agent called me recently about a job. At one point during the call she was obviously struggling to multitask and had to pause to say "I'm having trouble finding you on LinkedIn". My response was "I'm not on LinkedIn."
- 83457 4y agoDid she recommend creating an account and up to date profile there?
- greatartiste 4y agoI never thought I would say this but LinkedIn seems to have gone even further downhill than it was a few years ago. You know things are bad when even the low end recruiters seem to have left the platform. These days 90% of the contacts/connect requests I receive are from dodgy pension "advisors" trying to get their hands on my pension pot cash.
- ge96 4y agoNot directly related, whenever I get a new connection request, it is hard to tell if a person is real. Particularly if I don't know them first hand. The job history can be fake and profile photo generated by some GAN. It sucks but yeah, then later on they pitch something to you.
- greatartiste 4y agoYes I'm seeing those as well. The pictures are just a little to perfect & the job history non existent.
- NonNefarious 4y agoLinkedIn is replete with fake accounts. Look at the array of bimboes lined up down the right side of the page at any given moment, all "recruiters."
- dorfsmay 4y agoWhy would you consider a connection from somebody you have not worked with?
- peteradio 4y agoLinkedin should randomly send people made-up requests. They could collect statistics on the gullibility or neediness of the person and sell it!
- ge96 4y agoYeah it's a good question, most of mine are direct or recruiters. You have someone with "franchise" in their title, guess what... you get pitched a franchise. Idk what I was thinking. edit: part of it in my rationale is "being nice" but yeah I mostly use LinkedIn to get a job
- aspectmin 4y agoI recommend filing a report with the Microsoft Security Response Center, especially in light that a malicious party may now have information on you, and as people below pointed out there may be (1) risk of Doxing, and/or (2) there are some suggestions that Microsoft (LinkedIn) employees may be compromised. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc (Report an Issue)
- jupp0r 4y agoI wonder whether by compromised you mean: 1. compromised in the spy movie sense of them voluntarily passing information to the scammers (potentially for money) 2. compromised in the IT security sense of their accounts or computers having been hacked 3. some superset of 1. and 2.
- aspectmin 4y agoProbably simpler than both of those, more as in - there are allegations/comments suggesting that there may be individuals holding trusted positions who may not be as trustworthy as one would hope (based on the potential pathways by which malicious parties may have identified the OP). Insider threat is still a significant concern to companies, and were one representing Microsoft one might want to at least take a peek at what happened and make sure nothing untoward is occurring. Standard Disclaimers apply. I am not a Microsofty, nor do I play one on TV. Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
- FunnyBadger 4y agoMy primary take-home from having DOD/DOE security clearances, and having to sit through historical case studies every 3 months about security breaches, is that every DOD/DOE security lapses and espionage event in history were "trusted insiders" doing the deed. Physical security was long ago solved by pre-20th century tech like locks and security guards. No, it was always a trusted insider. There's no reason to assume that is any different with social media companies.
- codetrotter 4y ago
- ThinkBeat 4y agoSocial media is so dominated by just a few companies and most of them in America and most of them close together geographically. I think after a social media network reaches X or XX number of million users, all users should have the right to appeal getting blocked / deleted / removed arbitration by an independent third party
- peterburkimsher 4y agoI had LinkedIn until October 2021. A colleague was leaving, and I'd been asked to go around the team of 200 people, gathering farewell greetings. Another work project at the same time was the software language translations for our product. I manually trimmed the list of 200 colleagues down to 70 "international" names. Then I manually searched for each colleague on Google, and clicked the first link. Usually that was Facebook or LinkedIn. I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field. LinkedIn proceeded to block my account. "Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted." Politely explaining the situation to several customer service agents [Case: 211020-004202] didn't help. Had I been warned about viewing too many profiles too quickly, I'd certainly have slowed down! My actions weren't automated. I'd rather return to their online community and make this a learning experience, if possible. Being unable to use LinkedIn may affect my future career prospects, but I feel powerless to change it at this stage.
- smcin 4y ago> I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field. It sounds insane, but I suspect what tripped their heuristic was not so much looking at a lot of profiles but not messsaging any of them within LinkedIn's messaging system, which is their use-case for making money (recruiter/journalist/hiring manager/etc.) So your browsing behavior appears to LI's heuristics either like a scraper or a legit user who isn't likely to convert into a paying customer, and they simply don't care which you are (whatever the TOS might allow). I'm shocked LI's heuristics are that bad. I recommend you post your issue here (suitably anonymized) as a separate thread (link from here), and I expect it'll get upvoted.
- wildrhythms 4y agoBanned for a rate limit what the hell ...
- Nextgrid 4y agoWhy do you consider yourself unable to use LinkedIn? Create a new account with a new email.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoHappened to me with telegram. Reported a scammer in relevant tg channels, next thing I know , several users reported me, and telegram blocked me for spam.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
- boopmaster 4y agoyeah that one person who uses that one thing that you don’t support, prudent to call them out for not personally fixing the world. You have made a big, big difference today bud.
- eurasiantiger 4y agoI think I have, mate.
- vintermann 4y agoYup. I got some dkim-signed scam mails ("you have won an X" and "missing package details" scams) from a Danish domain, I figured that Denmark was civilized enough that it was worth it to try their domain provider's abuse reporting. Nope, I got an explosion of spam after that, including some that looked like sign ups for genuine newsletters (as much as anything without double opt in can be considered legitimate). Looks an awful lot like the domain registrar decided to punish me with more spam for trying to get their scammer buddy kicked off.
- the_biot 4y agoIt's pretty common for e.g. hosting providers that don't take spam seriously to just forward complaints to their spamming customer. Exactly the opposite of what they should do, and you've seen the result, but some companies just don't care.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teekert 4y ago
- okamiueru 4y agoThat's such a sad and completely avoidable situation.
- celdon25 4y agoIllegal drugs are a symptom, not a cure, of the healthcare system.
- cersa8 4y agoThanks for highlighting this side of "Illegal drugs". For some time I had to order Naltrexone (LDN) for my partner with ME/CFS with bitcoin as it was impossible to find a doctor who could subscribe this, let alone know about this specific treatment. She benefited greatly and it would not have been possible without very spammy looking pharmacy sites and bitcoin. Luckily things have improved and this is now possible using regular channels.
- teekert 4y agoYeah, I can't say anything about Wickr, from the comments it doesn't seem like the best place indeed. But In Brian Krebs' book he highlights the high quality of the drugs sold, and even the fact that big pharma investigated them expecting to bring people some scary stories, but they didn't find any. These pharmacies care about their customer's experience (of course they do, the want to sell you more).
- samhw 4y agoEh, I was semi-addicted to heroin, and I can testify - hell, I can give you a list of usernames from memory - that that's absolutely endemic on Wickr. It's the #1 go-to location for it[0]. It's not just 'virtuous' stuff like medical marijuana and abortion pills. I wasn't remotely surprised to read any of this. And I will bet you, at any odds you like, that the harms done by heroin (uh, 'medical diamorphine') and other opioids outstrip the few virtuous uses a hundredfold. [0] Perhaps second to the so-called dark web, though that serves a discovery purpose which is a bit orthogonal (and complementary) to Wickr.
- labster 4y agoI don’t understand why people are surprised to lose social media accounts like this. Companies decide to stop selling products all the time. We don’t see posts like this every time Wal-Mart decides to stop selling some brand of cookies, and it’s essentially the same relationship we have as their products.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y agoNobody really needs linked in. I wouldn't worry about it.
- paulgb 4y agoLinkedIn is an absolute cesspool, but some people do need a profile there, even if they don’t actively use it. If you’re doing sales or raising money, you basically have to have a profile there.
- masterof0 4y agoRecruiters pin you on LinkedIn all the time for interviews as well.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y agoGetting recruiters to talk to me isn't something you should really struggle with...
- masterof0 4y agoI dont have struggle, they reach out to me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn helps them to find you, unless you are just hoping they would just guess your email, etc... lol
- closedloop129 4y agoDo social networks stand a chance against infiltration? With the high turnover of moderators, it's easy to get somebody on the inside to get to know the inner workings of the moderation process.
- gxt 4y agoI don't understand why there isn't a protocol like email, but for "social media". Something like that combined with decentralized moderation ie you pay x group to filter out trash from public feeds and use that as default. Not happy with that moderation? Pick another one.
- Nextgrid 4y agoA different business model that 1) requires less moderators and 2) makes money so you can pay the remaining moderators enough that they actually stick around for longer and are less prone to bribery. 1 can be achieved by making it costly to break the rules. If new accounts have fees and privileges that accumulate over time (such as being able to post links, upload media, etc basically anything that is prone to abuse) then people will be less likely to break the rules since creating a new account will cost them money and time having to "level up" the new account before it can be useful again. This raises the cost of spamming dramatically and will often make it unprofitable. Stack Exchange has a model of this where new accounts with little "reputation" can't do much and are heavily rate-limited & unable to post links/images and gaining reputation involves contributing to the community which makes spam significantly harder. The same "reputation" system is used to encourage people to moderate the community (in a way that requires input from multiple people & fully transparent, so misuse is hard and will be easily detected). 2 involves making money which means "growth & engagement" goes out the window and you need to charge for the service. Not being based on "growth & engagement" means you can also achieve 1 because you can now be selective with the kinds of people & content you accept. > it's easy to get somebody on the inside to get to know the inner workings of the moderation process. Knowing the process shouldn't be a problem. Ideally the process should already be public - aka the list of "rules" one should abide by when joining the community. This is a non-problem that forums from back in the day managed to solve on a much lower (often zero) budget. It's only a problem when your business model is "growth & engagement".
- civilized 4y agoI guess our instincts were right when we found LinkedIn features like "view who viewed your page" super weird and creepy.
- Quequau 4y agoI moderate a few subreddits over on Reddit and spam purporting to be offers for black market drugs of abuse which use messaging services like Wickr & Telegram have been a problem for years. Worse, it's shockingly difficult to convince the site admins of Reddit to decisively act on this sort of content, even though it's explicitly against their site-wide policies. I suppose this is probably the case for every site which hosts user submitted content and an upper management focused on easily produced metrics like "number of posts & comments per time unit".
- dubswithus 4y ago
- snarkerson 4y ago
- RektBoy 4y agoNever happened this to you? Report bot spam? People did it for years in CSGO. Reporting players for cheating through SteamAPI and Valve didn't even validate these reports, if the account who is reporting someone, was actually in the game together. Nope. Just reaching a certain number of reports was an automatic ban. 2 years or something without fix, funny times.
- trhway 4y agoSimilar situation when one tries to argue with Russian "patriots".
- gwnywg 4y agoThis is one of the reasons I maintain offline list of all my LinkedIn contacts and also why I ban LinkedIn feed through AdBlock with custom rule. I currently use LinkedIn solely as medium enabling recruiters to cold call me, and as such it is good place to have an account because quite a few recruiters are there.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y ago[flagged]
- misja111 4y agoI don't understand why this was downvoted, I have noted the same. Many pro-Putin posts go around, pro-Ukrain posts get loads of hate comments and there are also lots of fake news posts trying to spread doubt about US/Nato intentions. I don't see nearly as many of these on FB, for instance. It seems LinkedIn is FB without content moderation.
- fredgrott 4y agoRelated to this how does one report Crypto draining scam scripts being posted on Github now that Microsoft owns GitHUb?
- Fargoan 4y ago
- julius_deane 4y agochill, these people were not stealing baby formula
- Fargoan 4y agoI don't understand
- freiherr 4y agoJust on Wickr itself. I wonder how secure it really is. Amazon only makes me suspicious. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out later that the algorithms implementation wasn't perfect. Or just straight out backdoor. PGP is the gold standard but the ease of use wins again.
- masterof0 4y agoVery, I know people who work there, they open sourced their crypto engine [1]. They also struggle with people using WickrMe for bad stuff because of how little info they collect from users (no phone required, true e2ee encryption, and so on...) [2].Own by Amazon doesn't imply that have spyware embedded, unless you can prove, not defending Amazon by any means, there is plenty to criticize and condemn about them, I'm just stating facts. 1- https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c 2- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/10/wickr-amazons-encrypted-chat-app-has-a-child-sex-abuse-problem.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/10/wickr-amazons-encrypted-chat...
- peanut_worm 4y agoWhy would they choose Linkedin of all places...
- dapids 4y agoDid you really need LinkedIn to begin with? Possibly the worst service I have ever used.
- ospzfmbbzr 4y agoAs a former longtime LI pro user and LI user at launch... I'm not surprised. LI loves spam and they have no intention of really doing anything about it. I refused to keep paying for such a low quality service. This has not negatively affected my consulting networking or revenues at all. Good riddance. It can go in the trash with FB.
- dwt204 4y agoAfter reading all of this, it might be time for me to wean myself from LI, so any tips you may have would be great. I run a small pro bono (sometime contracts) for apprenticeships and workforce development in disadvantaged working class and BIPOC communities. Revenue not so much as the networking is the thing that seems to be my biggest challenge without LI
- trinsic2 4y agoI left linkedin for all the shady things they are doing, see my previous comment for more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31762904#31767463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31762904#31767463. I rely mostly on my my website for marketing and some twitter. I write articles in my field that focus on topics that are not well covered, but important. When I create relevant content, google picks it up. It sounds like your field relies a lot on word of mouth, so maybe you can get your audience to talk about subjects that are important, by breaching topics that are a concern for your audience.
- Fargoan 4y agoI've only ever heard one person use the term BIPOC to refer to themself in real life. Do people actually say this? Other than that one guy, I only ever see the term online or hear it on NPR. And it seems to have only popped up in the last couple of years. My initial reaction when I heard it was that it seems kind of racist and weird to single out Indigenous and Black people then lump together the rest of the various groups of not White people in the world.
- feet 4y agoNot sure what illegal imagery has to do with drugs? AFAIK pictures of drugs is not illegal, the only pictures that I'm aware of that might be considered illegal would contain child abuse stuff, personal info, classified info? I understand that selling drugs is illegal, but in that case the selling of drugs is what is illegal and not an image
- edcastano 4y agoI am a PM with LinkedIn. DM me and I can try to funnel this to the right channels. I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of problems with LinkedIn, but the company's "heart" is generally in the right place.
- barneygale 4y agoWhy are you recommending private support channels? Shouldn't OP use your regular customer support channels?
- transcriptase 4y agoThose go to /dev/null like all major tech company regular customer support channels.
- yojo 4y agoNot sure if this is in good faith or not, but escalating through an internal contact is going to skip a couple layers of support at minimum, and reduce the chance of a misunderstanding. Also potentially some people in CS might be in on whatever is going on. If you were being snarky, it seems like this LinkedIn employee is trying to do the right thing. They probably don’t run support/there’s no reason to take cheap shots when they offer to help.
- 93po 4y agoIt's not a cheap shot. It's snarky but accurate commentary on the abysmal state of customer support and how absolutely worthless it is
- 0daystock 4y agoI don't understand the problem. You wanted to remain on a Microsoft social network being used for spam posts? Why?
- masterof0 4y agoAnd also wants to police it.
- 999900000999 4y agoLinkedIn, like every other social media/ dating app , makes money off spam. I reported someone for spamming me with an insurance sells scam, within a few hours I'm informed this spam is just fine. However, given your warning I'll refrain from reporting spam in the future.
- honestduane 4y agoThe problem with LinkedIn is that everything you do on that website is tracked and sold; there is no such thing as a private job application, for example.
- here4funzies 4y ago
- mise_en_place 4y agoGlad to see that spam is still well and alive in 2022, first we had enlarge your d*ck pills in email spam, now it's moved to all the social media platforms.
- siskiyou 4y agoIt first went mainstream on "social media" aka Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- peter_retief 4y agoI found LinkedIn a waste of time and full of bad actors, so not really surprised about this experience. I keep a presence there to appease a friend but put as little information about myself as possible on the platform and strongly recommend other developers do the same.
- dontbenebby 4y agoProbably because "view as" isn't anonymous, even if you adjust your privacy settings. (It'll say things like someone from X uni or with Y title viewed... easy to intuit who looked) On my end, I had issues after I "looked up" someone convicted of a serious crime[1] who lived in my area code. (I was looking into a different set of bad people. Apparently there's a lot of evil people on the internet. Not just the "dark web". They are everywhere, and abuse their access if they sense you're gunning for them in any sense of the word. The kids call reacting like some of did in real life "telling on yourself") [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/suburban-pittsburgh-man-sentenced-7-years-prison-violating-child-sexual-exploitation https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/suburban-pittsburgh-man...
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat happened if I may ask
- johnklos 4y agoSeriously: How do we know that these spammers who're using Wickr aren't directly paying LinkedIn and are being protected by LinkedIn? People used to say I was nuts when I said LinkedIn outright make things up, that they try to track much more than they rightly ever should, and that they were doing nefarious things with the data they collect, but of course now we all know that was true. We don't even know the true extent of their fabrications. Could LinkedIn be doing whatever it takes to make some extra money? It would neither be surprising nor unexpected in the least.
- nullc 4y agoWhy assume it's linkedin official policy rather than some rogue linkedin employees making money on the side?
- wmeredith 4y agoBecause they've had official policy that was user-hostile in the past. For example: scraping user address books and sending all their contacts LinkedIn spam without asking permission.
- qaisjp 4y agoDidn't most things do that back in the day? LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft!) supporting drug spam sounds ludicrous.
- 1024core 4y agoI open LI just to read a bunch of patting-myself-on-the-back and virtue signalling posts. Also: whenever I read about LinkedIn, I can't help but think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-g7e31nAb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-g7e31nAb8
- rpigab 4y agoBecause of your post, I went there, did the same search and reported a bunch of them. Now let's see what happens!