Scammers would like to connect with you on LinkedIn

You may soon have more to worry about on LinkedIn than cringey #successwin posts and requests for skills endorsements from people you barely know.

Driving the news: LinkedIn is warning that a growing number of its users are being defrauded by increasingly sophisticated recruitment scams, per the Financial Times.

  • Scammers pose as employers that are actually hiring (armed with copycat recruiter profiles and corporate websites), and reach out to jobseekers to set up a video interview.
     
  • They’ll then offer the “candidate” the job and ask for personal information, like banking details or sensitive documents, as part of a fake onboarding process, allowing them to breach private accounts or steal identities.

Why it’s happening: In the past, the expectation of in-person interviews made recruitment scams much more difficult to pull off. The rise of remote work has solved that problem for fraudsters. 

  • Many jobseekers will now go through an entire hiring process without ever meeting anyone in-person, so a scammer’s online-only presence is less likely to raise red flags.

  • More powerful artificial intelligence tools have also made it much easier to create credible-looking fake profiles—LinkedIn says it has blocked tens of millions of such accounts in the past few months.

Zoom out: The rise of LinkedIn scams is another example of how the shift from doing business IRL to online has been a boon for con artists and made identity verification more important, something other social media companies are already trying to cash in on.