the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, according to Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices, fraudsters exploit LinkedIn to lure users into cryptocurrency investment schemes pose a “significant threat” to the platform and consumers .
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On June 16th, in a statement LinkedIn said, “Teams at LinkedIn – like the one I help lead for trust, privacy, and equity – are tasked with the hard work needed every day to ensure that you can safely and securely connect to opportunity. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rise in fraudulent activity happening across the Internet, including here on LinkedIn, and heard questions on how we are working to prevent it. ”
The scheme works like this: A fraudster posing as a professional creates a fake profile and reaches out to a LinkedIn user. The scammer starts with small talk over LinkedIn messaging, and eventually offers to help the victim make money through a crypto investment. Victims interviewed by CNBC say since LinkedIn is a trusted platform for business networking, they tend to believe the investments are legitimate.
Typically, the fraudster directs the user to a legitimate investment platform for crypto, but after gaining their trust over several months, tells them to move the investment to a site controlled by the fraudster. The funds are then drained from the account.
We have noticed a large uptick in this type of crypto investment scam activity noy only on LinkedIn , but also on Instagram and Facebook
Much like the mass shooting issue, the people quoted in this article focus on the superficial aspects of the problem (the vehicle for the crime, i.e. the gun or the website) and ignores the more profound underlying issue. With the mass shootings, the underlying issue should be “what has degraded so profoundly in our culture that a teenager would target random children en masse in a classroom, something that NEVER happened and was unthinkable before 1999. With this issue, the underlying issue is “how on earth have critical thinking skills among apparently “educated” people (i.e. the professional population frequenting LinkedIn) so degraded that someone would fall for an online crypto scam?”. After all, who goes looking for investment opportunities on any website and seeks out anonymous people they will never meet and then sends them money?
I’m glad I didn’t invest a penny and that shit.