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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I have wondered about fake profiles on LinkedIn. Seems like people believe that someone is real and their credentials are real just because they have a profile. But it would be easy to set up an account with a fake photo, make up an educational and employment history, and current employer. None of this is verified, AFAICT. Then you just start following/connecting to recruiters and others who are Very Online on LinkedIn, to make the profile look legit.

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A particularly easy suggestion I first heard on the Risky Biz podcast after the reporting about fake CISOs: LinkedIn should prominently display profile creation dates.

Online dating apps do selfie verifications or identity proofing. LinkedIn could do the same as well. To verify someone's identity with a gov ID is about $1-$2 per proofing request.

https://stripe.com/identity (only as an example, many vendors offering this service)

How does the Gov ID verification work?

https://identity.stripedemos.com/

This will only create a market for old "used" accounts.

LinkedIn allows you to change your name and profile content as often as you wish, and doesn't keep or publicly expose any of a profile's past info.

"only" seems a bit harsh. It will probably solve some problems and create new ones instead, which then again need to be solved. But that's the story with any solution to a problem.

Agreed.

Better: social platforms should charge users monthly for an account.

No? I guess not. Funny to imagine though — the numbers of accounts on said platforms would collapse like the birth of a black hole. I'll bet it would be a lot more of a pleasant place to hang out though.

Why do you think people who pay money to create accounts to push their agenda will stop doing it when you tell them to cut the middleman? I bet the platform will just be 100% occupied by bots.

I'm assuming that the zero-cost (thus no barrier to entry) is part of the problem now. If everyone had to pay you would, at the very least, see a lot less bots and so no "chorus".

I disagree. From what I can see the problem is that people are receptive to propaganda on the internet, and you can’t really solve this. As long as this is the case, there will be people who can benefit from shifting public perception, and then it becomes merely a question of resources.

There’s lots of interesting grifts out there in LinkedIn.

We busted one guy who claimed to work somewhere 20 years ago that a colleague and I worked at. We thought he was a a former colleague - basically there was a guy named “John Smith” that was this guy. It was too long ago to disqualify the guy, so we validated his LinkedIn history items carefully and they were mostly bogus.

Everything looked legit in the surface. It was like a spy movie or something.

When I joined a large well-known tech company, their background check red flagged my claim of having previously worked in the research division of an automotive company. Luckily, I happened to know the tech company's CTO from when we both worked there! I don't know if the HR rep actually confirmed it with him when I offered him up as a reference.

Worse than that - you can create a LinkedIn job listing under that (unverified) employer.

My last employer got hit by that, and had report the listing to LinkedIn support and wait for them to remove it. Meanwhile the scammer could use to job listing to collect information from targets.

I think there's a lot of recruiters / hiring managers who just hire in bulk, who aren't - or don't need to - be very critical about who they hire; it's about reaching hiring goals (in terms of quantity.

Don't ever set hiring goals. Hire individuals, not numbers. Your company probably doesn't need to hire a hundred people in a month.

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