LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against 10 people who created thousands of abusive accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The action comes less than two months after security experts warned about
fake recruiters enticing users of the social network with well-paid
jobs.
On Monday, LinkedIn filed a lawsuit in
the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The
social network’s representatives said they deleted the fake profiles and
traced them to an account registered at cloud computing giant Amazon
Web Services.
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One of the fake LinkedIn profiles was put up by an attractive, bogus recruiter, named Annabella Erica. |
LinkedIn accused the suspects of
distributing malware on computers and puffing up users’ profiles. The
business-focused network said cyber-criminals violated its user
agreement by creating multiple fake accounts that stole data from
legitimate profiles through a method known as scraping.
“It undermines the integrity and
effectiveness of LinkedIn’s platform in several ways,” court documents
read. “The world’s professionals utilize LinkedIn with the expectation
that its contents are accurate and its user profiles legitimate.”
Court documents show no evidence that the
fake-account creators tried to break into LinkedIn systems. The filing
doesn’t specify what the suspects were doing with the fake resumes,
either.
LinkedIn asked Amazon Web Services for
the names of the owners of the bogus accounts. The cloud computing giant
did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to the
Wall Street Journal.
In November, experts warned about fake LinkedIn profiles that gather personal details and lead users to dangerous websites. Amid research into the growing number of social media scams, ESET detected several virulent campaigns that lured
victims with exciting job offers from attractive female recruiters.
