FAKE LINKEDIN CONNECTION REQUEST USING AI GENERATED IMAGES 🤖

All the profiles that are available on LinkedIn aren’t genuine. Some are fake created by fraudsters with malicious intentions. But this case here is interesting, as the fraudster used a PFP that was generated using AI.

I received a LinkedIn connection request from one Julie Andrews (Refer Fig The profile said Julie Andrews was a Python Developer based out of Canada. She had only 15 connections so far and there were three mutual connections (Refer Fig 2).

Sensing something amiss, and since I am on a vacation and have some leisure time, I thought of diving little deeper into investigating this. I saved the image of Julie Andrews to the desktop and uploaded it to Tineye at https://tineye.com (Refer Fig 3).

TinEye reported one matching result and suggested a URL. The screenshots from these URL are shown in Fig 4 and 5. 4/7

The URL is of https://generated.photos which uses AI to generate photos. As of now, they have more than 2.6 million AI generated photos. They also have a face-generator service, where one could generate a new face based on gender, age, skin, hair colour, emotions and head pose

A little 10 min investigation revealed the ever-growing threats in the digital space. This is one example where some faker is trying to misuse a professional platform, probably with a malicious intention. I tried complaining to LinkedIn, but couldn’t find a complaints page.

For free accounts, “Contact Us” page needed an article to be selected. I request LinkedIn to create a page for reporting fake connection request. And I request all members to verify the connection request before accepting it.

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