I might not be a twenty-something college student living my life on Facebook, but I do have a LinkedIn account (actually, I also have a Facebook account, I just never use it). I guess you could say LinkedIn is the Facebook for working professionals. Not everyone will agree with that categorization but this 40-ish father of 3 feels more at home on LinkedIn than I do on Facebook. Regardless how I define these virtual communities, they remain extremely popular. And once something on the Internet becomes that popular, it’s only a matter of time before the “spammers” invade.

The beauty of social networks?

Social networking is great, or so their creators want you to believe. You can keep in touch with friends, network with other like minded people, and basically stay “connected” all from a web based “virtual” community. Of course, to realize the full potential of these communities you need to hand over a certain amount of personal information. LinkedIn seems to prefer work related information. And while it’s not required, the more you hand over the more complete and customized your experience — at least that’s the intention. Fear not, safe guards do exist in these systems and I’m certainly not running around screaming that the sky is falling; however, a complete “profile” is the key to maximizing these social networks and exactly what spammers are searching for.

How I was spammed from my LinkedIn account

On LinkedIn my profile is 55% complete and yet that is all that was necessary for a “spammer” to figure out where I currently work (no real big secret), call my place of employment to get my direct work number, and then call me at work for a little “spam” action.

The executive recruitment company of KG Search (URL not included because I don’t want to give them the link back) has a “research team” that scans the profiles on LinkedIn to find people that might be interested in some of their job openings. Once they find a match, the name is handed off to one of their recruitment representatives that claim they too are members of LinkedIn (search as I did, I never found the profile for the recruiter that called me). When they call you, however, they don’t come straight out and ask you if you’re interested in a new job. Instead, they take a subtler approach and ask if you would help them “network” with other professionals that might be interested in an executive position at some unnamed company. I suspect the idea is for the person they call to say, “Hey, forget my network of professional contacts, I want that job.” You see, the job they call you about is typically in line with your current position and work experience. Coincidence?

When they called me, I was caught completely off guard. It’s been a few years since I’ve received a cold call from a head-hunter, and KG Search’s request to network with other professionals was a new approach. I quizzed the person on the other end of the phone about who she was, why she was calling me, and what in my profile said I was even remotely interested in receiving such phone solicitation. The double talk was fast and furious but when the call was over I had told them I believed they were probably in violation of LinkedIn’s end user agreement and at the very least, abusing LinkedIn’s system. When I got off the phone I sent an email to LinkedIn informing them of the abuse and this is what they had to say:

Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. I apologize for this happening to you, this is totally unacceptable. We do not give out any information regarding our members nor do we even have telephone numbers on file.

We are contacting this person to let them know that this needs to stop, they are violating our privacy statement.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please let me know. Have a great day and thank you for using LinkedIn!

Will spam ultimately kill social network?

I was pleased to read that LinkedIn took this abuse seriously. They do have a nice system but if spammers start to abuse it, that will mark the end of their good thing. The crowd on Facebook and MySpace might not mind spam interruptions fed by their profiles on these social sites, but the LinkedIn crowd is a bit older and, in my opinion, less tolerant of spam. In the end all of this got me wondering, is this type of spam abuse of social networks inevitable and was my LinkedIn experience an isolated incident or have other LinkedIn users received the same type of cold calls?

Please add a comment if you’ve had a spam experience that was generated by your profile on some social network.

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