Sunday, August 28, 2022

Can LinkedIn filter scammers?

 A couple of days ago, I got this phishing message on Linkedin


The English is pretty bad and the location of the person in Africa makes it suspicious. It immediately jumped to my mind that this is a great opportunity to test reverse image search capabilities to check the legitimacy of the sender.

Starting with Microsoft Image search I got this non helpful answer:

Namely similar poses but wrong persons. 

I used Yandex image search and get the following:



The first hit is exact match for someone named Sarah Benson's instagram page:

Finally Google reverse image search brought the following:
A combination of two ads, two correctly returned results, one Veronica Manesh and one anti scam forum Maria Zabrash (which points to non existing Facebook page). 

I also tried Baidu reverse image search but i wasn't able to get it to work at all.

Overall it seems super easy to find the same persons image in multiple accounts assuming different names. I wonder why LinkedIn has no profile checking to make sure the image is legit?

Next I tried to search for this not real English text of "I see it as a nice pleasure, getting in touch with you". I found it in many places on the web mainly in dating sites featuring African woman and also in some scam warning sites. Again it took me a couple of seconds to find many sites that should have ring the alarm bells.

To conclude it seems there is zero effort from LinkeIn side to filter scam. In terms of the best reverse image search I often find Yandex to work better than the others. 






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