Unemployment has always been an issue in the world, but with the way things have been going in 2020, it has gotten even worse. People try whatever they can to be able to find work opportunities or find better opportunities than the ones they already have. One of the most popular places to do this, is online, on LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn is used by professionals all over the world to network and connect with people in their fields all over the world. A lot of people today have found work solely through LinkedIn. 

For people who can’t always scroll around on their LinkedIn feeds, their push emails tend to be the way they keep up with any potential opportunities through their push email notifications. When you’re really hoping to get work, you let your guard down and could end up clicking on emails that may seem like they’re from LinkedIn, but are not.

Phishing is when you receive an email that seems like it’s from a legitimate website, in this case, LinkedIn, but in reality, it’s from a hacker trying to trick you into typing out your website passwords or give them access to other sensitive data. They make the emails and web pages look very convincing, if you aren’t aware of Phishing scams, you might not even notice that you’re not dealing with the real website until it’s too late!

The phishing emails tend to copy the subject lines of the emails you would actually get from LinkedIn like “You appeared in new searches this week!’, ‘People are looking at your LinkedIn profile’, ‘Please add me to your Linkedin network’, and ‘Join my network on LinkedIn’. Since the actual website uses these too, you might not pay that much attention and click on the email so you can be redirected to the LinkedIn site to inspect further, but on the way there, might end up losing your data instead. 

You don’t have to fall for these scams though. There are ways that you can protect yourself from LinkedIn scams like this, all they require is for you to pay a little more attention while opening emails and clicking on any links. 

Ways to Protect Yourself From LinkedIn Scams

Whenever you receive an email from LinkedIn, tap on the address that the email came from to be able to see the entire email address. A legitimate email from the site would have an address that ends with “@linkedin.com” never anything like “@gmail.com”. This is the easiest way to tell the difference between the two types of emails. 

Another way to tell if an email isn’t legitimate is to pay closer attention to the text written in the actual email. See if there are any grammatical errors or weird sentence usage in the text at all. Sometimes the phishing emails are written using Google Translate or are simply typed automatically, a legitimate email would not have the errors.

Finally, a simple way to avoid being scammed is to never type out your email and password unless the website is trusted. Ideally, you should only log in if you visit the website yourself. A phishing email often leads you to a scam website where you type out your email and password and the hacker on the other end just sees you type it and saves your data immediately. 

Hackers that use LinkedIn users for their scams attack you when you least expect it, but if you’re careful and attentive, you can spot the scam and trash that email as soon as you see it so you don’t end up falling victim to one of these emails.