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!
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-...
What happened in the end?
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...)
That’s funny, thanks for that.
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?
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-exec...
I'm bottom of the ladder but have seeing the option to do it for at least a year.
If it’s an option and not required, then that doesn’t solve it.
Any clue what’s there "Persona" program that they are trying to push hard "so you can have so much positive leads"?
You mean @fooco.com? Or @foocousa.com? Or @fooco.xyz? @fooco.ai? @foocoltd.net? @foo.co.uk?
How would LinkedIn validate that your email domain belongs to the company you claim to work for?
With a company-managed list of owned domains where real employees have their work email addresses (unrelated to website domains).
And using DNS to prove that a domain is actually owned by this organization
Email domains of employee addresses aren't necessarily owned by the company. For example:
For security purposes, on the other hand, the important part is proving that the LinkedIn account is owned by the organization.Then there are old school ISPs where there was no separation between company and customer email addresses.
Presumably because the official company page is registered under it?
Not all companies use email addresses under the same domain as the "official company page" though.
What HelloNurse said, whoever it is that runs the company page on LinkedIn provides a list of domains that they consider theirs.
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.
I had a LinkedIn account connected to my company email and one day I found myself locked out.
They want me to upload a govt id and blink my eyes in a video to get unlocked.
They can go jump.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
> I don’t know how do they even harvest emails from Linkedin.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/LinkedIn
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.
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.
>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.
I agree with you. I used to work for an ISP that sold kind-of overpriced 1Gbps connections and always wondered why customers bought it. Probably helping things was that we took them out to "events", floor seats at basketball, etc. The company just has a fixed expense, but the people making the decision get free stuff that makes them feel important, and it was kind of a way of transferring the company's money (by not buying the $29/month Internet connection) to themselves. I never felt good about it, but if you say that out loud, everyone will look at you like you're crazy.
AWS did this for us at the time but the 3 people in the company that used AWS services never got to go to these things. So I doubly don't get it.
Vendor bribe swag is basically ubiquitous in the industrial world. When I worked in oil and gas it was quite common for a vendor to do a 'lunch and learn' where they bought the whole office very good lunch and we listened to them pitch whatever product line they wanted us to specify for design customers. I work in a more socially responsible but less lucrative industry now and alas no vendors buying me lunch
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And I'd like people to understand that, legally, corruption necessarily envolves the government. Informally, corruption has been applied to any type of bureaucracy but, even then, an exchange of favors itself isn't corruption, only if an unauthorized deviation from the involved agent's role happens.
Not that relying on this is a good idea.
That sure is an interesting take from someone with "anarchist" in their username. IMHO corruption is any time you use power/influence/station in order to skew the normal well-behaved channels of governance (cybernetics) for personal gain. Any system with hierarchy can have corruption. Bernie Madoff was an example of illegal, private industry corruption.
> corruption necessarily envolves the government
False. [0] If the bank teller demands a bribe to let you withdraw from your account, that's corruption, even though they aren't working for the government.
> Corruption is the dishonest, fraudulent, or criminal use of entrusted authority or power for personal gain or other unlawful or unethical benefits. Corruption occurs in politics, business, education, media, and other social and economic fields.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/corruption
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.
Brazillian law, for instance, defines the crimes of passive and active corruption:
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] 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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption
That is literally just a translation difference for bribery, a common issue for Brazilian Portuguese vs English.
[https://www.jusbrasil.com.br/topicos/10598684/artigo-317-do-...].
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/bribery]
I'm not fond of Brittanica's definition of corruption [https://www.britannica.com/topic/bribery].
It might as well describe any crime, similar to definition c from earlier. Even still, Britannica memtions gifts, which points to corruption being primarily connected to bribery: I suppose I agree with the lack of formal definition for corruption, but defining "corruption" as simply "evil" makes the word ontologically empty, but adding a corrupting element to it (bribe), makes it more defined.> 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.
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.
I wonder if a cease and desist to their legal department would work better?
<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
How does that not become a legal issue?
Who are we gonna sue? LinkedIn? I think my place of employment has better things to do than sue Microsoft.
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.