My Experience with a Linkedin scammer(s).
According to Reader’s Digest UK, the first six months of 2022 saw about 5.5M more fake accounts on LinkedIn than the previous six months. In this article, “The 3 Most Common LinkedIn Scams and How to Spot Them”,- a lot of the things I pointed out are similar.
Monday 20 March 2023. The time is 12:56 am.
I got a LinkedIn DM about someone named “Shinthia Islam” who needs a Facebook advertising expert. The budget is immediately suspect. I respond by saying;- “I’d like to learn more”. This person goes on to share the social media and web pages of @OransiUSA
First, why is the person trying to hire me with a supposed budget of $100k monthly having a “#OpenToWork” on her profile picture? and I am sorry, this face doesn’t strike me as a “Shinthia Islam”.
By the way, @OransiUSA does NOT have an open role for a Facebook advertising expert on their careers page here: https://oransi.com/pages/careers, but check out the hashtags. “#SocialSecurityDisability” caught my eye as odd as it is a type of insurance, not a social media marketing thingy.
Next, education history. Why is my recruiter just trying to get a BaSc? What is Leading Light IT? My recruiter says she is in the US, but Dhaka International University- @diubd is in #Bangladesh. Leading light IT redirects to https://travelleya.com — a non-active domain currently up for sale.
Due to the #OpenToWork on the Linkedin AVI, a reverse image search is fruitless. So I check the company page for Leading Light IT. They are located in Dhaka #Bangladesh, have 1.2K employees (curious) and somehow managed more than 300% headcount growth in the last 6 months alone! Weird.
I go back to read Shinthia Islam’s profile. She says she’d had jobs in customer service, but there are no corresponding job experiences on her profile. Even weirder, she claims to have worked previously as a team manager which again doesn’t correspond to her job history.
At this point, Shinthia Islam sends a link to supposedly check my JD, KPIs, etc. I wondered why it wasn’t simply on LinkedIn as a post, or a Gdrive form, website etc; rather it was an iCloud link (weird) with another strange name: “Helmfried Vogts” with zero digital footprints.
I checked Leading Light IT’s employees & two things jumped out. 1, DIN Islam- is he Shinthia Islam’s brother, or did they simply share the same surname? Also, how many HR officers does a company need? Note that some are LinkedIn premium accounts, but it gets even weirder.
Remember this? Monowara Begum- https://linkedin.com/in/monowara-begum-3669b4264/… and Shinthia Islam https://linkedin.com/in/shinthia-islam-081370265/… just happen to have the same profile, word for word. Even weirder? This pattern begins to repeat itself. Many employee profiles were very similar. Another “coincidence”: many employees somehow attended or are attending the University of Dhaka- @diubd. They are also either located in Dhaka or the United States. By the way, this is across 1.2k accounts.
One of the recurring patterns- Sandha Rani’s activity, where she supposedly started a new role at Undrground 4 days ago: https://linkedin.com/in/sandha-rani-934632265/is… very similar to Nur Alam here: https://linkedin.com/in/nur-alam-524b98261… who also announced it 4 days ago. There are many recurring patterns like this.
A reverse image search of Sandha Rani’ AVI reveals it is a stolen identity. The actual owner of the picture is Liza Bosak, a lecturer in statistics and faculty member at World University, Bangladesh- @worldunibd, which has stopped tweeting since 2018. This pattern starts to show up multiple times across many accounts.
Haraj Ali is Amit Jain- A growth leader at Infinity Business Insights @IBInsightsLLP in #India.
Mst Aleya- https://linkedin.com/in/mst-aleya-9517a9268… is Hani Rajpoot, a graphic designer- https://linkedin.com/in/hani-rajpoot-56a650205/?originalSubdomain=pk… in #Pakistan.
When I tried to reach out to the actual owners of the identities, I got this blocker which is a problem. I am not interested in trying premium, but perhaps a button to notify the person that their identity is being used w/o their consent?
Notice how the last post has over 100 comments? In some cases, >300 comments? It is the same set of accounts from the same company reposting the same things & making the same spam comments on identical posts repeatedly. I suspect it is probably one or a few people behind this entire thing.
Remember the iCloud link? I say I cannot asses it, and Shinthia Islam starts to ask for screenshots. This is where I use my block button and mark it as “spam”. So Shinthia Islam’s motive and endgame are still very much unclear, and I hope I have not been compromised. End.
