I've gotten thousands of fake LinkedIn profiles removed.
Here's what I learned in the process.
How investigators can identify fake LinkedIn profiles and hacked or otherwise deceptive company pages.
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. It's gotten to the point that if a person doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, they're considered untrustworthy in the job market.
Jay Jones — The Profiler — experienced the pervasiveness of fraud on LinkedIn when he was laid off in December 2023. Using the #opentowork banner, he was flooded with offers from supposed resume writers. His daughter was due to be born in two weeks. He soon realized the "resume writers" were scammers looking to steal his personal information and money. That's when The Profiler began hunting fake profiles.
"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."
— Jay Jones, The Profiler · Indicator · April 21, 2026The core problem, as Jay explains in his Indicator piece, 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. In the piece, Jay documents the specific indicators, red flags, and investigative methods behind tens of thousands of successful LinkedIn takedowns — providing a field-tested manual for anyone working to identify fake profiles and hacked or otherwise deceptive company pages.
I've gotten thousands of fake LinkedIn profiles removed. Here's what I learned in the process.
Indicator · By Jay Jones · April 21, 2026
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