Thursday, June 6, 2019

Someone is impersonating me on LinkedIn

An alert MIT grad student received a LinkedIn request that appeared to be from me, except not quite, and was kind enough to let me know. (In fact I don't have a LinkedIn account...)

There is someone on LinkedIn, it turns out, pretending to be me--same name, same jobs at Harvard and Stanford, same 2012 Nobel prize. Here's his profile:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-roth-a37995186/

If you have a LinkedIn account, you can go to that profile, click on the three dot link, and get to a link called Report, one of whose options is to 'report an impersonator'.  (You can't send any explanatory text, so maybe getting many such reports will prompt LinkedIn to do something, where one or two haven't yet done the trick...)

thanks,
al

p.s. Here's the LinkedIn help page for reporting fake profiles (if you have a LinkedIn account).
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Update: LinkedIn followed up pretty quickly, and apparently nuked the fake account:

Response (06/06/2019 23:02 CST)

Hi Alvin,

I hope this email finds you well and that you are having a fantastic day, I'm Heisenberg from the Safety Operations Team and I'll be happy to assist you!

Thanks for informing us of this situation.

It is against the terms of LinkedIn's User Agreement and Professional Community Policies to impersonate another person on the website. We'll take the appropriate action based on the results of our investigation.

Thanks for your assistance in making LinkedIn a professional and trustworthy site.

Regards,

Heisenberg
LinkedIn Safety Operations Support Specialist 

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