4 ms·

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 pro

by pants2 4mo ago

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. 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!

tweetle_beetle 4mo ago
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-ceo-of-linkedin https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...
- rootsudo 4mo ago
  That’s funny, thanks for that.
- rendaw 4mo ago
  What happened in the end?
  - throwa356262 4mo ago
    Microsoft bought LinkedIn. He got a huge package. Everyone lived happily ever after. (LinkedIn eventually locked and then deleted his account, https://awesomeatyourjob.com/1140-bringing-more-laughter-fun-and-connection-to-the-workplace-with-chris-duffy/ https://awesomeatyourjob.com/1140-bringing-more-laughter-fun...)
sensanaty 4mo ago
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?
- pants2 4mo ago
  According to my research, LinkedIn only does this for executive and now recruiter-like titles, but not broadly. You may be able to in order to get "verified on LinkedIn" but it's not a requirement for showing association with a company. https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-executive-verification-mandatory https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-exec...
  - jamesfinlayson 4mo ago
    I'm bottom of the ladder but have seeing the option to do it for at least a year.
    - kortilla 4mo ago
      If it’s an option and not required, then that doesn’t solve it.
      - psychoslave 4mo ago
        Any clue what’s there "Persona" program that they are trying to push hard "so you can have so much positive leads"?
- 3abiton 4mo ago
  I have the same. The difference is, if you do email verification, you will "verified" status. If not, you can still add the company to your linkedin, just unverified, which is not a label.
- freeopinion 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
underlipton 4mo ago
>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.
- bit-anarchist 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lazide 4mo ago
    Bwahaha, no it doesn’t. Legally ‘corruption’ doesn’t exist, as in there is no single law saying ‘corruption is illegal’. (What is ‘corruption’ exactly?) There are laws against bribery, which does generally only apply to the government, but in many locations applies to pseudo-government roles like notaries, apostiloes, lawyers, etc. There are laws against embezzlement (a type of corruption), and those definitely apply to private individuals. There are laws against insider trading, a type of corruption. Those generally only apply to businesses/private folks, not the government, with some exceptions. Then there is the various kinds of fraud, blackmail, etc. Most people would consider them corruption too. Those apply to private individuals and government agents too. And many more. It’s a smorgasbord.
    - bit-anarchist 4mo ago
      Brazillian law, for instance, defines the crimes of passive and active corruption: The Penal Code, in Article 317, defines the crime of passive corruption as "soliciting or receiving, for oneself or for others, directly or indirectly, even if outside the function or before assuming it, an undue advantage, or accepting a promise of such an advantage." [0] Active corruption, committed by an outsider, who offers or promises an undue advantage, is provided for in Article 333 of the Brazilian Penal Code. [1] But, granted, revieweing US and UK law, it seems they don't define "corruption" as a crime (albeit some of the act names do mention corruption). So let's fallback onto the dictionary: [2] a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers) : depravity b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery) c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct Both definition a and c are too ample and, as you put it, "a smorgasbord". Definition b, specially when combined with a, describes something pretty specific: inducement of a powerful agent to wrong by improper or unlawful means, such as bribes. Embezzlement is better typified under theft. Same goes for most of the others: fraud is fraud, blackmail is blackmail. They may acquire a "corrupt" character when they are done in direct exchange of personal material gains. There are discussions about whether insider trading should be illegal. Generally speaking, corruption is primarily a crime against public administration because it involves the government, which (supposedly) represents the people. Private companies represent themselves, so they get to (more) trivially decide who is on the line or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_corruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_corruption [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption
throwaway7783 4mo ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
> 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.
cbm-vic-20 4mo ago
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.
prawn 4mo ago
How does that not become a legal issue?
- pants2 4mo ago
  Who are we gonna sue? LinkedIn? I think my place of employment has better things to do than sue Microsoft.
teiferer 4mo ago
> 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.
dainank 4mo ago
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).
sph 4mo ago
> 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.
- latexr 4mo ago
  > I don’t know how do they even harvest emails from Linkedin. https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/LinkedIn https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/LinkedIn
  - kitse 4mo ago
    this is from 2016. at time they had ~400 million users,and the breach is 164 million, Now it's close to 1.5 B. People these days use aggregators like Apollo, signal hire, apify. There are 1000s of such tools.
medwards666 4mo ago
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.
dspillett 4mo ago
> 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.
tliltocatl 4mo ago
I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?
- ian_holt 4mo ago
  <I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?> I assume you mean the LinkedIn legal dept. The problem there is that these companies are so big that a 'complaint' or 'cease & desist' to them would be like a mosquito bite, if that, & most likely get lost in the 10s of thousands of other complaints. It's the same with FB & Insta, etc. One of my daughters had a FB acct taken over that she had accumulated quite a following (~100k plus) with her custom hand drawn artwork. It was impossible to get any acknowledgement of the issue let alone get a suitable solution. And, unfortunately these large companies do not care. Sometime makes you wonder if LinkedIn & the like are even worth it
monksy 4mo ago
Yet they'll go after fun users that make paraody pages saying they worked at places during huge failures. I.e. Dan Woods. (he's the guy that said he worked at aws for a month and then us-east1 went down, etc)

by pants2 4mo ago

tweetle_beetle 4mo ago

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-ceo-of-linkedin https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...

rootsudo 4mo ago
That’s funny, thanks for that.
rendaw 4mo ago
What happened in the end?
- throwa356262 4mo ago
  Microsoft bought LinkedIn. He got a huge package. Everyone lived happily ever after. (LinkedIn eventually locked and then deleted his account, https://awesomeatyourjob.com/1140-bringing-more-laughter-fun-and-connection-to-the-workplace-with-chris-duffy/ https://awesomeatyourjob.com/1140-bringing-more-laughter-fun...)

sensanaty 4mo ago

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?

pants2 4mo ago
According to my research, LinkedIn only does this for executive and now recruiter-like titles, but not broadly. You may be able to in order to get "verified on LinkedIn" but it's not a requirement for showing association with a company. https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-executive-verification-mandatory https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-exec...
- jamesfinlayson 4mo ago
  I'm bottom of the ladder but have seeing the option to do it for at least a year.
  - kortilla 4mo ago
    If it’s an option and not required, then that doesn’t solve it.
    - psychoslave 4mo ago
      Any clue what’s there "Persona" program that they are trying to push hard "so you can have so much positive leads"?
3abiton 4mo ago
I have the same. The difference is, if you do email verification, you will "verified" status. If not, you can still add the company to your linkedin, just unverified, which is not a label.
freeopinion 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

underlipton 4mo ago

>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.

bit-anarchist 4mo ago
[flagged]
- lazide 4mo ago
  Bwahaha, no it doesn’t. Legally ‘corruption’ doesn’t exist, as in there is no single law saying ‘corruption is illegal’. (What is ‘corruption’ exactly?) There are laws against bribery, which does generally only apply to the government, but in many locations applies to pseudo-government roles like notaries, apostiloes, lawyers, etc. There are laws against embezzlement (a type of corruption), and those definitely apply to private individuals. There are laws against insider trading, a type of corruption. Those generally only apply to businesses/private folks, not the government, with some exceptions. Then there is the various kinds of fraud, blackmail, etc. Most people would consider them corruption too. Those apply to private individuals and government agents too. And many more. It’s a smorgasbord.
  - bit-anarchist 4mo ago
    Brazillian law, for instance, defines the crimes of passive and active corruption: The Penal Code, in Article 317, defines the crime of passive corruption as "soliciting or receiving, for oneself or for others, directly or indirectly, even if outside the function or before assuming it, an undue advantage, or accepting a promise of such an advantage." [0] Active corruption, committed by an outsider, who offers or promises an undue advantage, is provided for in Article 333 of the Brazilian Penal Code. [1] But, granted, revieweing US and UK law, it seems they don't define "corruption" as a crime (albeit some of the act names do mention corruption). So let's fallback onto the dictionary: [2] a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers) : depravity b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery) c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct Both definition a and c are too ample and, as you put it, "a smorgasbord". Definition b, specially when combined with a, describes something pretty specific: inducement of a powerful agent to wrong by improper or unlawful means, such as bribes. Embezzlement is better typified under theft. Same goes for most of the others: fraud is fraud, blackmail is blackmail. They may acquire a "corrupt" character when they are done in direct exchange of personal material gains. There are discussions about whether insider trading should be illegal. Generally speaking, corruption is primarily a crime against public administration because it involves the government, which (supposedly) represents the people. Private companies represent themselves, so they get to (more) trivially decide who is on the line or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_corruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_corruption [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption

throwaway7783 4mo ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago

> 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.

cbm-vic-20 4mo ago

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.

prawn 4mo ago

How does that not become a legal issue?

pants2 4mo ago
Who are we gonna sue? LinkedIn? I think my place of employment has better things to do than sue Microsoft.

teiferer 4mo ago

> 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.

dainank 4mo ago

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).

sph 4mo ago

> 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.

latexr 4mo ago
> I don’t know how do they even harvest emails from Linkedin. https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/LinkedIn https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/LinkedIn
- kitse 4mo ago
  this is from 2016. at time they had ~400 million users,and the breach is 164 million, Now it's close to 1.5 B. People these days use aggregators like Apollo, signal hire, apify. There are 1000s of such tools.

medwards666 4mo ago

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.

dspillett 4mo ago

> 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.

tliltocatl 4mo ago

I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?

ian_holt 4mo ago
<I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?> I assume you mean the LinkedIn legal dept. The problem there is that these companies are so big that a 'complaint' or 'cease & desist' to them would be like a mosquito bite, if that, & most likely get lost in the 10s of thousands of other complaints. It's the same with FB & Insta, etc. One of my daughters had a FB acct taken over that she had accumulated quite a following (~100k plus) with her custom hand drawn artwork. It was impossible to get any acknowledgement of the issue let alone get a suitable solution. And, unfortunately these large companies do not care. Sometime makes you wonder if LinkedIn & the like are even worth it

monksy 4mo ago

Yet they'll go after fun users that make paraody pages saying they worked at places during huge failures. I.e. Dan Woods. (he's the guy that said he worked at aws for a month and then us-east1 went down, etc)