Yup. They used to (or maybe still do) have 5 pages of "Do you know these people? What about these?" each time I logged in, and in one of the pages it would ask to connect to your contacts. I don't know how but they actually tricked me into do it that, and all my gmail "contacts" (read: anyone i ever sent an e-mail to) received an invite to connect to me. I received hundreds on new connections over the following days.

I closed LinkedIn last year when I realized I never got anything remotely good out of it. It's a terrible place to find jobs. There is no lack of websites that do the same, but better.

Correct. Pretty much each time you logged in it tried to do it. Scummy in the extreme