In this photo illustration the logo of LinkedIn can be seen on a smartphone on March 10, 2022 in Berlin, Germany.
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Last week, a developer who tracks LinkedIn spotted massive drops in people claiming to work at Apple and Amazon.
LinkedIn confirmed to Insider that the purge is part of its ongoing effort to tackle fraud and fake accounts.
LinkedIn has warned its users to be wary of people asking for money on the platform as it sees a rise in fraud.
Last week, the number of employees who listed Apple as their employer on LinkedIn was slashed in half over a 24-hour period.
Despite what it may look like, this wasn’t the result of massive internal turmoil at Apple, but rather, a crackdown by LinkedIn on fake and bot accounts.
Jay Pinho, a developer who tracks data on the professional networking site, was the first to spot plummeting employee numbers at Apple and Amazon. He shared his findings with Krebs on Security, a cybersecurity blog.
On October 10, 576,562 LinkedIn accounts listed Apple as their current employer. The next day, there were less than 285,000, Pinho found.
Pinho said a similar scenario happened with Amazon, which saw a 33% drop in its employee headcount on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn confirmed to Insider that the nosedive in employee numbers resulted from its efforts to remove fake accounts using automation and human reviewers.
Experts warn that these fake accounts are often used for fraud and financial scams. Scammers often rope in unwitting companies or universities, listing them on their profiles to lend a sense of credibility to their false accounts.
LinkedIn’s battle to take on fake accounts has occurred mainly out of the spotlight, with most of the public focused on Twitter’s potential bot issue amid that company’s months-long legal battle with Elon Musk.
But LinkedIn’s issue was highlighted in August when Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, tweeted that “LinkedIn has 7000 profiles of ‘Binance employees’, of which only 50 or so are real.” He called some of these accounts “scammers” and warned his followers to “be careful.”
It appears that LinkedIn took action shortly after that tweet. Like the overnight drops in employee headcount at Apple and Amazon, Pinho saw a 23% drop at Binance in early September, he told Krebs on Security.
That same month, LinkedIn admitted to seeing a rise in fraudulent activity on its platform, warning users to be wary of people on the forum who ask for money.
In a statement to Insider, Greg Snapper, a spokesperson for LinkedIn, said, “we regularly take action to stop fake accounts on our platform and are constantly improving our systems to stop fakes before they come online. While this is an ongoing challenge given how bad actors continue to get more sophisticated, we do stop the vast majority of fraudulent activity we detect in our community – around 96% of fake accounts and around 99.1% of spam and scams.”