LinkedIn Job Scams

Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world:

In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. In Mexico, bad actors capitalize on the informal nature of the job economy by advertising fake formal roles that carry a promise of security. In Nigeria, scamsters often manage to get LinkedIn users to share their login credentials with the lure of paid work, preying on their desperation amid an especially acute unemployment crisis.

These are scams involving fraudulent employers convincing prospective employees to send them money for various fees. There is an entirely different set of scams involving fraudulent employees getting hired for remote jobs.

Tags: fraud, LinkedIn, scams

Posted on December 31, 2025 at 7:03 AM • 10 Comments

Comments

TimH • December 31, 2025 7:38 AM

Yet another wrapper for advance fee fraud. Easier to detect by asking “Why do I need to pay an upfront fee for this?”

Last one I saw was a required on-line credit che,ck (something like $40) for renting a property. The scammers owned the purported credit check portal and it is difficult to show that they are associated with any (ficticious) property listings.

Clive Robinson • December 31, 2025 8:56 AM

@ ALL,

I read this in the quote,

“Nigeria, scamsters often manage to get LinkedIn users to share their login credentials with the lure of paid work, preying on their desperation amid an especially acute unemployment crisis.“

And I immediately think,

“Unemployment crisis only in Nigeria?”

It may not be as bad in the UK as it is in the US or many other countries. But the real unemployment rate is rising.

A big indicator of this is the so called “gig economy”…

But as is often the case you have to pay someone to get into such jobs or “rent equipment”.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between an “employer” or someone “on the take”.

I’ve mentioned in the past a UK Hospital in South West London, that had nearly all the “out sourced” cleaning staff from ISS Mediclean taken away and three managers arrested,

https://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/4750593.blackmail-arrests-at-kingston-hospital-contractor/

This sort of thing is not exactly uncommon.

Another example is of an unqualified person “borrowing” for kickback a qualified nurses ID and “working bank” through an agency.

Then there are… Delivery people who are not legally allowed to work, who take over accounts and bikes etc for those who are allowed to work.

One person was found to have six such gig-jobs, yet was actually working full time. Basically they had rented out the gig-jobs to “illegals” at 25% fee each.

The list goes on and on.

KC • December 31, 2025 12:16 PM

In LinkedIn’s self-reported transparency center, the charts overwhelmingly show that the platform’s automated defenses are removing a very high percentages of fake accounts (97.1%) and spam and scams (98.7%). In this regard, it’s amazing that members still reported 385,900 spam and scams in the most recent reporting period.

https://about.linkedin.com/transparency

In the government data request section, I’m curious why not every country from this article is listed.

I’m glad articles like the one in the OP are being published. People may not know to be aware. It says a lot that people were willing to share their personal stories to capture the nuances of these encounters.

Jurjen • December 31, 2025 3:00 PM

But I still can’t figure out why someone made a fake profile (with fake publications even), trying to make a connection.
I spotted it because he claimed that I was a coauthor on one of the articles 🙂

Ben Rothke • December 31, 2025 5:12 PM

I have a piece on LinkedIn job scams. Part of the problem is that LinkedIn makes it very difficult to have these bogus profiles deactivated.

Even when I show them evidence from the employer that the person pretending to be an employee is not employed there, LinkedIn won’t delete the profile.

They simply do not care.

https://medium.com/@brothke/linkedin-job-scams-the-ultimate-invisible-gorilla-b76362c4b7db

Clive Robinson • December 31, 2025 6:49 PM

With regards LinkedIn and,

“They simply do not care.”

They do, but it’s only about the bottom line.

Almost from the day LinkedIn got going they did questionable things that could make the owner of what was FaceBook –now meta– look honourable to grow membership.

Perhaps the least offensive thing they did was to without permission access your “contacts list” and them spam people saying that you had “recommend them”…

Not true as the Managing Director at a company I had worked for had to send out an apology EMail back then.

I’ve therefore not had any contact with LinkedIn and try and avoid going to any pages associated to them.

However I’ve spoken to others and they have told me other “Horror Stories” about LinkedIn. Which as I’ve not directly witnessed I will not repeat (other than to say “apparently” they were quite litigious in the past).

But I will note that LinkedIn were sufficient “nuisance / harassment” for me to dump my private EMail account. And let’s just say Cory Doctorow 2022 comment on “Enshittification” certainly applies to LinkedIn in all but one respect…

“There was no move to such behaviour by LinkedIn… they were like that from day one.”

From mine and others observations of them, I guess it was a “founders decision”[1]

[1] They are reported to be, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillan, and Reid Hoffman.

It appears Hoffman was the driving force behind all of what we would regard as the “bad choices” and not only made millions but has “apparently” become a VC Guru at Greylock Partners and is worth billions, by encouraging and using similar scummy behaviours (so a hand I’m never going to shake). If you want to feel nauseous [2],

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/538-story-linkedin-from-humble-beginnings-global-tiago-vasconcelos-pb9ve

Oh and obviously he’s the type that Microsoft just love, as they put him on their board when they bought LinkedIn… As they say “birds of a feather flock together”.

[2] The author has also recently written,

Could Robots Have Sex in the Future? A Scientific Look at Machine Intimacy and Data-Driven Reproduction

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/664-could-robots-have-sex-future-scientific-look-tiago-vasconcelos-ekene

So yeh make appropriate judgements about his journalistic abilities…

Jan van Prooijen • January 1, 2026 9:16 AM

In the past I received twice a connection request from a fake account.
Back then I was working as information security consultant in the Netherlands for an international IT-company.
I assumed it was to get knowledge about who is who in the company. And take into account, that they had contracts with banks and governments, including the American DOD.

Rontea • January 1, 2026 9:34 AM

This wave of LinkedIn job scams highlights a fundamental truth about our digital ecosystem: trust is both our greatest asset and our biggest vulnerability. Scammers succeed not because of sophisticated exploits, but because they exploit human expectations and the implicit credibility we grant to platforms like LinkedIn. In countries like Nigeria, where economic pressures are acute, the combination of desperation and platform trust creates a perfect attack surface.
The broader implication is that social engineering continues to outpace technical defenses. As long as users believe the platform’s reputation confers legitimacy, attackers will thrive. LinkedIn and similar networks need to adopt systemic countermeasures—better verification, anomaly detection, and user education—rather than expecting individuals to shoulder the full burden of risk. In the long term, this is a trust problem, not a technology problem.

lurker • January 1, 2026 12:16 PM

@Rontea
“better verification, anomaly detection, and user education”

costs money, for no obvious RoI.

“rather than expecting individuals to shoulder the full burden of risk.”

Externalising risk is part of the modern C suite mantra. To fix this by starting at the top won’t get far if we look at the global “tops”.

cls • January 2, 2026 11:44 PM

StinktIn was clearly a scam from the get go. I signed up for it right away but it quickly became clear the site was simply for phishing compensation levels and other resume scams.

At first we all linked up with people we’d worked with, nearly none of whom I could honestly recommend or wanted to ever work with again.

I tried using connections in job search 2 or 3 times, got literally nothing from it. Was always most productive getting leads with friends of friends, or parents of my kids friends (coop school), etc.

By mid 2000s I let my account fallow with broken links etc to stop the spam. Account got trashed about 10 years later probably from one of their well known password leaks. I closed it then, had to do password recovery, ha!

LinkedIn Job Scams

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