Borneo Magazine

Spammers may be using your photo for the fake profiles they set up on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and other social networks. Here’s how I found out, and what you can do about it. While working on another post on how to avoid connecting with fake LinkedIn profiles, I took a closer look at a connection request I had received through LinkedIn, which I had identified as spam. I knew it was a fake profile and a spammy request because the profile had a small number of connections, had only one company listed under experience, the title “Manager” was mispelled as “mangar,” and the first name on the profile was “Myrtle.” Any one of those items might be understandable by itself, but add them all up and it was easy to spot this as a fake profile. Normally all I would do in this situation would be to click the “X” and ignore the request. But I got curious and did a little more research, and that’s where things got interesting. I knew the photo was of a real person, because I could see the ph...