Several LinkedIn Accounts pretending to be employees apple inc AAPL and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN were drastically culled overnight, reportedly due to an initiative to ban bots from the platform.
What happened: As of October 10, there were 576,562 LinkedIn “users” who listed Apple as their current employer. Half of those profiles disappeared the next day, reported cancer over safety.
A similar thing happened to LinkedIn profiles linked to Amazon, the report said, as they fell 33% to 838,601.
a developer, Jay Pinho, who used LinkedIn to track the number of employees at various organizations on a daily basis, noted last week that Apple and Amazon had significantly fewer people claiming to work for them than they did 24 hours earlier. Pinho also shared screenshots showing the overnight downsizing on October 10.
binance chairman Changpeng Zhao addressed this issue in August, tweeting, “LinkedIn has 7,000 profiles of ‘Binance employees,’ of which only about 50 are real.”
LinkedIn reportedly took action soon after. Pinho told Krebs on Security that he observed a 23% drop in Binance employees working on the platform in early September.
Why it matters: LinkedIn has tried to curb that fraudulent activityincluding removing fake profiles that would remove profiles of legitimate employees, change pictures and publish them, according to Krebs.
Although the reason for the explosion of fake profiles is unclear, the cybersecurity company is clientrecently acquired from alphabet inc‘s WELL Google Googletold Bloomberg that North Korean government hackers stole resumes and job board profiles as part of a plan to land cryptocurrency jobs.
