I've gotten thousands of fake Linkedin profiles removed. Here's what I learned in the process

Jay Jones is a senior copywriter turned globally recognized external threat and impersonation risk consultant, best known as “The Profiler.” He is the author of The Profiler's Scam Detection Guide.

LinkedIn presents itself as the professional internet’s most trusted marketplace: a place to hire, get hired, build credibility, and conduct real business. But it’s also a hub for fraud, impersonation, inflated authority, and deceptive outreach. This is true of every social platform, but LinkedIn is not just a networking platform. It is a reputational layer that people increasingly treat as evidence of legitimacy. It’s gotten to the point that if a person doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, they’re considered untrustworthy in the job market.

I experienced the pervasiveness of fraud on LinkedIn when I was laid off in December 2023. I used the #opentowork banner and was flooded with offers from resume writers. I thought they were real and helpful because I urgently needed a new role. My daughter was due to be born in two weeks. I soon realized the “resume writers” were scammers looking to steal my personal information and money. That’s when I began hunting fake profiles and working to combat LinkedIn scams.

I now go by The Profiler. Since 2023, by my count, I've helped take down over 53,000 fake jobs and 7,000 fake profiles on LinkedIn. I learned how the platform rewards polished presentation, verified-looking pages, and volume over verification, and how it creates the conditions for bad actors to blend in. 

The core problem is that LinkedIn’s trust signals are easy to mimic and enforcement is too slow. A page with a logo, a company description, several employees, and active posts can look legitimate even when it is not. It’s easy to fabricate a recruiter profile with polished branding and a believable title. A job post can appear to come from a real employer while actually being scraped, relabeled, or used to harvest applicant data. For investigators, the key insight is that the platform’s “professional” aesthetic is part of the fraud surface.

Here’s a look at how investigators can identify fake profiles and hacked or otherwise deceptive company pages, based on my research and tens of thousands of successful takedowns.