LinkedIn has reportedly purged more than 250,000 fake Apple employees from its database of professionals as it continues to wrestle with a growing number of imposters on its platform.
While LinkedIn is yet to confirm that it took action, numbers shared in a new report have a huge number of accounts, all claiming to be Apple employees, disappearing earlier this month. Notably, the same also seems to have happened to employees claiming to work for Amazon — almost 400,000 of them.
If you’re wondering why that mysterious job offer at Apple Park has suddenly evaporated, you might want to check you were ever talking to the real Tim Cook…
Fake Tim Cook
According to numbers collected by developer Jay Pinho (opens in new tab) and shared with Krebs On Security, LinkedIn purged the accounts between 11:06 am and 11:02 pm on October 10. There were previously more than 576,000 accounts claiming to work for Apple, while the number fell to just 285,000.
It was a similar story for Amazon, also on the same day. The previous number of 1.2 million employees fell to less than 840,000 within a matter of hours. While LinkedIn isn’t admitting that it deleted fake accounts, the fact that both of these numbers fell at the same time suggests something was done. Neither Apple nor Amazon commented when asked to by Krebs on Security. LinkedIn simply said that it constantly works to clear out fake accounts.
It isn’t yet clear why these fake accounts exist or who is creating them, although one Cybersecurity firm previously told Bloomberg that some North Korean hackers have been faking profiles in an attempt to get themselves jobs at large crypto firms.
Another suggestion is that people are using impressive-looking LinkedIn accounts as a way to lure people into scams, particularly those that get unsuspecting people to invest in cryptocurrencies. Whatever the reason, it’s easy to see why LinkedIn might want them gone.