*Edit, just looked back on these and it really was outright deception. They would spam messages by your contacts written in the first person "I would like to connect", "I'd like to add you to my professional network." signed by them. Impersonating people for profit is definitely on the wire fraud spectrum. Screw that guy.
This early behaviour made LinkedIn utterly toxic amongst the tech community in the early days. Nobody using them would be offered a job, as any applicant using LinkedIn would be demonstrating they are clueless (or worse, endorsed this behaviour).
Quite how LinkedIn managed to overcome this and have people trust them (!) I will never be able to understand.
I held off from joining LI for years after that.