Anatomy of a LinkedIn spammer profile

I’ve been getting an increasing amount of fishy connection requests on LinkedIn lately, and nearly all used obviously fake account info. Spam requests from someone I didn’t know or had no obvious connection to were something I used to just ignore until the first one that looked like this.

Putting aside the “why?” some random SEO dude from San Jose and I should be connected on LinkedIn, it looks like a legit profile. The usual flags of having no profile pic or being located offshore are missing, and the profile title isn’t in ALL CAPS. But obviously we wouldn’t be here if it were.

Our priors suggest that any random 3rd degree connection is likely a spammer to start with. Especially if they’re in a sales or BD role, no matter what country they’re in (for what it’s worth, a Django developer in Argentina who I’ve never met might be someone I could actually help out and have an interest in having some connection with; a cold caller in New Jersey not so much).

Okay, so we’ve got an unknown person, in a sales or BD role (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course), who lists… a day school as education. Any school called “day school” is usually a hoity-toity private school somewhere in the K-12 range. What’s not captured in the screenshot is that Paul got a bachelors degree from this school. It’s a K-8 school in San Francisco, if you’re wondering. If Paul had done 20 seconds of Google research first he might have figured that out… unless he did and either didn’t care or didn’t understand what that meant.

Well, “education” doesn’t really mean that here anyhow, it’s really just a hat tip to credentialism and additional avenues for networking. What does Paul actually do?

Oh.

Looks like Paul is in the word vomit business, something related to SEO.

If it weren’t fishy already it is now. So why does Paul have such a nice profile pic? I had to scrounge around for a pic other than my universal avatar (below), and that involved screen scraping from a video of one of the conference talks I gave.

F*!# this is an awesome avatar. But I digress.

You know what we can do? We can see where else this photo might be shown. Just right click on the profile pic, select “Copy image URL”, then navigate to Google Images, click the camera icon in the search bar, and paste the URL.

So, where else is Paul on the internet?

Oh my god, Paul is actually Jeff! Jeff made all of this up!

Wait. That doesn’t make any sense. No, it looks like “Paul” just used Jeff’s head shot. (Jeff: great photo, by the way)

So there you have it. Unknown BD/sales in marketing with a good profile pic.

I’m not even mad anymore, just bored. Figure out a new game, spammers.