The trust of a growing number of job seekers on LinkedIn, the professional networking platform appears to be steadily eroding.
The platform which has over 1.2 billion members globally, built its reputation on professional trust and institutional credibility.
However, what was once positioned as a gateway to career mobility is increasingly being exploited as a low-barrier hunting ground for fraudsters, who capitalise on economic uncertainty, local hiring norms and persistent weaknesses within recruitment systems.
In Nigeria, where youth unemployment remains particularly severe, scammers often pursue a strategy: Credential theft amid acute unemployment, or account takeover.
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Emmanuel Faith, founder of HR Clinic, said LinkedIn’s trust-based architecture makes it particularly attractive to criminals. According to him, users are often predisposed to believe what they see on the platform, a vulnerability scammer are quick to exploit.
“They want to believe it’s real. That’s what scammers count on,” Faith said. In addition, he noted that LinkedIn profiles contain detailed personal and professional data, making it easier to personalise attacks. As a result, as more Nigerians apply for jobs remotely, the potential attack surface continues to expand.
This dynamic is reflected in individual experiences. Busola, a 27-year-old Lagos-based philosophy graduate seeking work in digital marketing, said she was approached on LinkedIn with an offer to earn cryptocurrency by promoting products.
“They told me to give them my login credentials so they could show me how their job flow works,” she said. “I hesitated, but I was desperate, so I shared my details.”
By the following morning, she had lost access to her account. Subsequently, it was used to distribute fraudulent job referrals across her professional network.
By contrast, Gbenga Ogunniyi, a data strategist, said familiarity with similar cases helped him avoid the same fate.
“When they asked for my login details, I knew instantly it was a scam,” he said. “Because I know people who had their accounts hacked the same way, I didn’t proceed.”
Beyond financial and professional losses, the emotional toll of such incidents is also becoming more apparent, according to Peace Nduka, an executive virtual assistant and workflow automation specialist.
LinkedIn-linked job scams also cut across major labour markets beyond Lagos like Nairobi, Mumbai and Mexico City. Victims report losses ranging from a few hundred dollars to as much as $25,000.
Although the tactics vary from region to region, the basic idea is to appear trustworthy enough to ease doubts, then turn people’s need for a job into profit.
To curb this and other scam-related activity, the platform blocked 97 percent of fake accounts from January to June 2025, according to LinkedIn’s transparency report.
“Our automated defenses blocked 97.1 percent of the fake accounts we stopped during the January – June 2025 period, with the remaining 2.9 percent stopped by our manual investigations and restrictions.
“About 99.5 percent of the fake accounts were stopped proactively, before a member report. We continue enhancing our defenses to prevent and remove malicious accounts.”
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Ghost job postings
Beyond outright fraud, users are increasingly frustrated by what they describe as “ghost jobs”: postings that appear legitimate but are never filled.
Alex Omenye, a content marketer and creative writer, commenting on the platform, said it has become saturated with misleading vacancies.
“There’s been a noticeable rise in job ads, which looks like good news on the surface,” he wrote. “But beneath that is data mining disguised as hiring, vague recycled descriptions, permanently open roles, and zero employer signal.”
He argued that LinkedIn should require companies to confirm when roles are filled or paused, automatically flagging job listings that linger without hiring activity.
Others pointed to the persistence of outdated listings and a surge in scam outreach after applying for roles.
Fake jobs
Another is network marketing traps or positions that are advertised as corporate roles but turn out to be multi-level marketing schemes requiring product purchases.
Edetan Ogbeide recounted his experience attending what he believed was a professional job assessment, only to discover it was a deceptive recruitment tactic for a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme.
According to him, “a month after completing my one-year mandatory NYSC for university/polytechnic graduates, I received an interview invite for a job at Yaba, Lagos.”
“I headed for the venue on the appointed day, excited and nervous, not knowing what to expect as it was my first job interview in the ‘Favor’ market.”
“I met other job seekers there and we wrote a test. After the test nah, that is how they started coming out, one after the other to give motivational speeches on how you cannot live your dreams by working as an employee and showing us pictures and videos of their members on vacation in South Africa. (They were all this GNLD peeps).”
”Almost 90 percent of the job seekers took their leave in annoyance when the first speaker began after realising it was ‘them’. I was still new to the labour market and was amazed at this film unfolding before my eyes that I decided to watch the movie to the end credits.”
“Long and short of it all, was that, we were expected to pay some money to be introduced into this world of wealth”.
Adenike Oladipo, agreed noting, “My first job interview after NYSC, the Center was filled up like it was a real job interview. It was not even funny, very annoying. I feel victim like 3 to 4 times. I know their style of invitation.
The “Trust Gap” crisis
The core of this trend is the erosion of institutional credibility. LinkedIn’s “trust-based architecture”, the idea that a professional profile is a verified identity is now its greatest vulnerability. Scammers are moving towards high-fidelity to fuel larger identity theft operations.
Crowded, opaque labour market
Practices such as talent pipelining, employer-brand signalling and the routine use of evergreen roles, combined with poor coordination between applicant tracking systems and external platforms, have created a crowded and opaque labour market in which verifying the authenticity of opportunities has become increasingly difficult.
For job seekers, the responsibility for due diligence has effectively become an unpaid extension of the job search itself. For LinkedIn, the issue is more fundamental. The platform faces a credibility test: whether it can restore confidence in a marketplace where long-term value is anchored in trust, not scale or traffic.
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What this means
Practices such as talent pipelining, employer-brand signalling and the routine use of evergreen roles, combined with poor coordination between applicant tracking systems and external platforms, have created a crowded and opaque labour market in which verifying the authenticity of opportunities has become increasingly difficult.
This trend indicates that due diligence is no longer optional, but is now a required part of the job search.
For job seekers, the responsibility for due diligence has effectively become an unpaid extension of the job search itself.
They now need to spend extra hours verifying that a recruiter actually works at the company they claim to represent.
For LinkedIn, the issue is more fundamental. The platform faces a credibility test: whether it can restore confidence in a marketplace where long-term value is anchored in trust, not scale or traffic.
