LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.

We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down.

I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection!

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tweetle_beetle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LinkedIn didn't even disavow people pretending to work for LinkedIn until someone had too much fun with it - https://chrisduffycomedy.com/blog/2016/11/2/6-months-as-the-...

	▲	rootsudo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s funny, thanks for that.

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prawn 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does that not become a legal issue?

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sensanaty 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My last 2 companies, LinkedIn asked me to add an email address associated with the said company and actually confirm via said email in order to add them to my profile. So, if I worked for FooCompany, I had to have a @FooCompany.com email which is setup by someone at the company itself. Does this not cover what you're talking about?

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pants2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

According to my research, LinkedIn only does this for executive and now recruiter-like titles, but not broadly. You may be able to in order to get "verified on LinkedIn" but it's not a requirement for showing association with a company.

https://www.theverge.com/news/771210/linkedin-recruiter-exec...

	▲	jamesfinlayson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm bottom of the ladder but have seeing the option to do it for at least a year.

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3abiton 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have the same. The difference is, if you do email verification, you will "verified" status. If not, you can still add the company to your linkedin, just unverified, which is not a label.

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ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile.

I remember getting an office manager, working from Dubai (I think), for my one-person, basically nonexistent company, working from my living room, in New York.

She may still be there. I never bother checking into LI, except making an occasional post, every few months.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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cbm-vic-20 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was looking for people who I had worked with at a company that was acquired 15 years ago, and some random person claims to be the CEO of that company.

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underlipton 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn

I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.

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jrockway an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with you. I used to work for an ISP that sold kind-of overpriced 1Gbps connections and always wondered why customers bought it. Probably helping things was that we took them out to "events", floor seats at basketball, etc. The company just has a fixed expense, but the people making the decision get free stuff that makes them feel important, and it was kind of a way of transferring the company's money (by not buying the $29/month Internet connection) to themselves. I never felt good about it, but if you say that out loud, everyone will look at you like you're crazy.

AWS did this for us at the time but the 3 people in the company that used AWS services never got to go to these things. So I doubly don't get it.

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bit-anarchist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And I'd like people to understand that, legally, corruption necessarily envolves the government. Informally, corruption has been applied to any type of bureaucracy but, even then, an exchange of favors itself isn't corruption, only if an unauthorized deviation from the involved agent's role happens.

Not that relying on this is a good idea.

	▲	lazide 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bwahaha, no it doesn’t. Legally ‘corruption’ doesn’t exist, as in there is no single law saying ‘corruption is illegal’. (What is ‘corruption’ exactly?) There are laws against bribery, which does generally only apply to the government, but in many locations applies to pseudo-government roles like notaries, apostiloes, lawyers, etc. There are laws against embezzlement (a type of corruption), and those definitely apply to private individuals. There are laws against insider trading, a type of corruption. Those generally only apply to businesses/private folks, not the government, with some exceptions. Then there is the various kinds of fraud, blackmail, etc. Most people would consider them corruption too. Those apply to private individuals and government agents too. And many more. It’s a smorgasbord.

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sublinear 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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throwaway7783 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LinkedIn doesn't have any redressal mechanisms for anything. Someone I knew went through a lot of abuse by a LI user and kept making new accounts to harass. LinkedIn's response - "We did not find anything that violates our ToC". No wonder it has become a cesspool of spam, fraud and abusers.