Job Scams on Social Media on the Rise
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Appearances can be misleading! Authorities have issued a warning about an upsurge in attempted job scams on LinkedIn.
When creating their personal networks, scammers take advantage of the platform's professional reputation and the faith its users have placed in it. To make their schemes work, fraudsters create phoney accounts and construct a wide network in order to give their profile legitimacy.
How the scam works
Most of the time, they pose as specialists in a given field who work in major speciality firms. These bogus accounts list real employees of the scammer's apparent organisation as contacts, sometimes even managers or executives.
The scammer then contacts the intended victim via the network's private messaging system and offers to assist them in making profitable investments, generally in cryptocurrency.
These investments are initially made on reputable exchange platforms. The scammer will then recommend that the victim relocate their investments to another site, this time owned by a scammer, in order to empty their accounts over time.
LinkedIn is aware of the issue and is working to mitigate this new type of long-term fraud as much as possible.
Unlike in the past, when the criminal feigned to have a romantic interest in the target, the lure of financial gains and a general lack of information about cryptoassets are prompting some users to lose their guard.
Job scams on the rise
In other instances, fake job advertisements are used to gather the information of LinkedIn members. Indeed, it is absolutely simple to publish a job offer under the pretence of a legitimate company's LinkedIn account, posing as a real offer from that organisation.
In its most recent transparency report, issued in 2021, the professional social network admitted to removing roughly 32 million fraudulent accounts and 136 million job scams and spam messages during the year.
According to a survey conducted by Atlas VPN in the first quarter of 2022, LinkedIn was the focus of more than 50% of all phishing scams globally, with hackers attempting to obtain a user's personal information through their LinkedIn account.
Unfortunately, many users use the same password on multiple websites. LinkedIn is the major target for a new generation of scammers due to the trust it instils in its users and its reputation as a professional network. With a message open rate of roughly 47 per cent, they can easily reach a huge number of users.
Source: Free Malaysia Today