There is quite a lot going on over on LinkedIn. Some of it is even validly business-related and useful, but a significant amount is not. This has worsened with its continued slide towards becoming more & more like facebørk, a deliberate strategem by its owner.
There is phishing, impersonation, social engineering… If you are female there is also quite a lot of stalking, misogyny, chauvanism, machismo, objectification – but these are mainly just toxic societal ills rather than deliberate enemy action, although there are some who clearly think that LinkedIn is some sort of dating/hookup site too!!
A colleague was once invited to the North Korean Embassy to discuss… well, we’re not sure what. Strangely, working in the world of security, he didn’t feel the urge to take up the invitation.
So here’s a really poorly constructed attempt to get my personal information that appeared tonight at around 01:30-02:00 UK time. That’s 🚩 already a red flag; senior executives don’t tend to post to LinkedIn at that sort of time of day.
Let’s look at the whole comment. Someone very senior seems interested in my talents (likely 🚩 of course), how exciting…
The really glaring red flags being;
- 🚩 Sense of urgency
- 🚩 Large organisation apparently collecting personal information using a non-corporate outlook.com email address
- 🚩 Linguistic Anomaly: a clearly British person (see below) who does not appear to have spent long periods in the USA wouldn’t use the term resume. They would say CV. If I had to use that term, I would at least spell it correctly, resumé, with the diacritic!
- 🚩 AI indicator. Someone typing out a message on LinkedIn is highly unlikely to include both n-dashes and m-dashes. This stinks of “copypasta”™️ from an output originating from, most likely, ChatGPT.
Prior to his appointment at RELX Group, Nick served as Group Finance Director at Centrica plc from 2007 to 2014. Before joining Centrica plc, he served as the Chief Financial Officer at The Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) between 2003 and 2007. He worked at P&O and its affiliated companies for 15 years in a variety of senior finance roles. Nick began his career as an accountant with KPMG and has a degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford.
Potted History of the real Nick Luff
So this all fails the Smell Test. Not a highly technical test, to be sure, but an important one for picking up what I like to call Déjà Moo, “I’ve smelled this bullsh*t before”.
Let’s look a little deeper, just for a laugh.
This “senior executive” with zero followers suddenly seems to need a lot of people all at once in the middle of the night. Hmm.
I mean, it’s all a bit obvious and poorly put together isn’t it?
Take the profile photo…
And then there is another profile that is much more credible, with a photo at least matching the real person’s image from news items…
Of course, the real Nick Luff probably doesn’t know someone is (rather badly) impersonating him and trying, apparently, to fill 10 different posts…
So, overall score: 1/10 if I’m feeling generous, given that there are more red flags than in a Jubilee Street Party’s Bunting.
The serious point here, however, is that despite the amateurish & laughable attempt that this one is, there are more sophisticated, better constructed, and more thoughtfully targeted versions of this around.
The cardinal rule, as ever, is STOP AND THINK before acting. Look for those red flags, and don’t ignore them.
And for those old enough….
Sophie Baskerville 