“Eliana” wants to swipe your contact list
Eliana Bernstein is a zombie. Or maybe she never existed. But she’s out there on LinkedIn trying to sneak a peek at your contact information and the details of your network.
Online social networks are based on trust, so it’s disappointing to see abuse of LinkedIn cropping up in China, as some nefarious users are creating fake profiles of attractive people from famous companies in order to grab contact details from unsuspecting users.
I just received a connection request from someone claiming to be Eliana Bernstein, with an unusually professional looking profile photo, and claiming to be a brand manager at Coca-Cola in China.
As a professional skeptic and wanting to protect the privacy of my network, I popped “Eliana’s” picture into Google Image search which brought up the following results.
Sure enough, whoever is claiming to be Eliana is using a stock photo of an attractive professional woman, supporting this with a simple background from a famous company, and collecting contacts from unsuspecting LinkedIn users.
So far the fake Eliana has managed to scrounge up more than 500 connections (surely these are people that she trusts), including 58 people from my own network.
It’s not clear what the game is behind this scam, but my guess would be that the ever-desperate expat investment consultants are the most likely culprits. It’s also possible that some misguided headhunter is trying this out, but they don’t usually need to adopt such measures to get you to link up.
As always, please be careful who you connect with on LinkedIn, and have a good week.
Leave a Reply