There has been a recent surge in the number of LinkedIn bots and as many as 50 per cent of Apple employee accounts were wiped from the professional networking platform, in a bid to trim down the LinkedIn bot accounts. More than 576,000 LinkedIn bot accounts that listed Apple as their employer or Apple LinkedIn accounts were removed and only 284,991 bot accounts are left at the moment, and the accounts were removed in a single day, a report claims.
According to a report by Krebs On Security, a developer named Jay Pinho, who is working on a product that tracks company data and hiring, noticed unusual activity -- Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several large organisations and last week he noticed that two of them (including Apple) had a dramatic fall in the number of people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours earlier.
There has been a similar dramatic decline in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at retail giant Amazon amid LinkedIn's struggles to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users, Krebs On Security report added.
Pinho also noticed that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, which is a 33 per cent fall.
It should be noted that neither Amazon nor Apple has responded to requests for comment, the Krebs On Security report noted.
This comes months after Microsoft-owned LinkedIn acknowledged that it was witnessing fraudulent activities on the platform. "Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rise in fraudulent activity happening across the Internet, including here on LinkedIn, and heard questions on how we are working to prevent it," the company had said in a statement.