Only 50 out of 7,000 LinkedIn profiles of Binance employees are real, claims CEO

Majority of LinkedIn profiles claiming to be employees of crypto exchange Binance are fake according to its chief executive Changpeng Zhao. “LinkedIn has 7,000 profiles of Binance employees, of which only 50 or so are real. I wished LinkedIn has a feature to let the company verify people,”  Zhao said in a Twitter post.

He also warned that there are many "hey I am responsible for listing" scammers on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has acknowledged the issue of fake profiles and is taking various measures to block such accounts before they are created.

In its transparency report for July-December 2021, LinkedIn said that its automated tools blocked 96% of all fake accounts while the rest were blocked manually. LinkedIn said that it blocked 11.9 million accounts at the time of registration and proactively blocked 4.4 million accounts before members reported them during the six months.

Crypto investment scams are rampant on LinkedIn, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  In June, FBI special agent Sean Ragan told CNBC that crypto fraud on LinkedIn is a "significant threat" with many potential victims. Most of these frauds are carried out through fake accounts. LinkedIn claims it has 830 million users across 200 countries. LinkedIn claims it has 82 million users in India. Last December the platform rolled out Hindi language support for Indian users.

Crypto scams have also grown in India after the boom in crypto investments after the pandemic. Though the crypto bear market has led to a slowdown in investments, scams continue to be a problem. For instance, the GainBitcoin Ponzi scam that was uncovered early this year is said to have tricked around 1 lakh investors who may have been scammed of more than ₹1 trillion, according to an ET report.

Fake user profiles or accounts is a widespread concern on all major social media platforms.

The $44 billion deal by Tesla CEO Elon Musk also fell through after the microblogging platform could not allegedly provide accurate information on the number of fake and bot accounts.

Twitter maintained that the number of spam accounts on its platform was less than 5% of the monetisable daily active users.  Musk argued that the actual number was four to five times more than that.