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Fake LinkedIn profiles are not okay, Okay

By

Neville Hobson

•

Okay App

Would you imagine that a new company has profiles on the business social network LinkedIn that build up a solid picture of smart and influential staff members working for a legitimate business – yet the profiles are fakes?

That’s what Okay App has done according to Hans Kullin, who writes about his suspicions being proven after he received a couple of requests to connect:

[…] It didn’t take much investigation to find out that these LinkedIn profiles were completely fake, as were several others from the same app company. First of all, their resumés were very short and looked a lot like each other. Then there was the obvious fact that their profile pictures were stolen, unless one of them was the identical twin of a Miss Ecuador 2012 contestant. The photo of “Chloe Anderson” is in fact the Norwegian model Polina Barbasova.

linkedin-chloe-500x176

[…] Why would anyone do this on purpose, one might ask. I suspect the answer is to get in touch with online influencers who in turn would spread the word about the app in social media.

Wearing my devil’s advocate hat for a moment, it could just be overly-earnest employees, maybe simply sharing a copy-and-paste boilerplate CV text with each other and taking “the Facebook approach” to using a photo of a favourite celebrity or glamorous star instead of one that’s the real you.

Definitely not a good idea on a place like LinkedIn where the intertwining of what you say, how you present yourself and the networking, recommendation and verification effects are largely built on trust.

If they don’t know better, a good place to look is LinkedIn itself which has some handy tips on how to create an effective LinkedIn profile.

So, assuming Okay App is a legit business – the CEO’s LinkedIn profile looks real enough – I’d say they have a trust mountain to climb. How big a mountain depends on what they do to address accusations of fakery, especially if Hans’ story gains traction. If LinkedIn profiles are fakes, what else might not be real?

23 responses to “Fake LinkedIn profiles are not okay, Okay”

  1. shelholtz avatar
    shelholtz

    I got a slew of these a couple month ago, all claiming to be from high-end gossip and fashion magazines. When I noted it in a Facebook update, a number of people told me they were experiencing the same thing. This has been going on for quite a while!

  2. Paul Sutton avatar
    Paul Sutton

    This is spot on, Neville. I was one of the ‘lucky ones’ who was invited to connect by a number of Okay App employees, including the beautiful Chloe highlighted above. It was obvious they were fake, or spam profiles and I didn’t connect with any of them. But further more, I didn’t even check out the company and nor would I.

    Okay has completely blown any trust with me and, by the looks of it, others too. For me, that mountain is almost insurmountable. It’s an awful, awful strategy.

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