If you haven’t received a fishy email from a foreign prince offering untold fortunes lately, that may be because online scammers have found a new and surprisingly lucrative platform to exploit.
Fraudsters are now using the professional networking website LinkedIn to fleece unsuspecting investors. Some have lost more than a million dollars.
The fraud focuses on cryptocurrency, with scammers messaging LinkedIn users and encouraging them to invest in known cryptocurrency exchanges, such as crypto.com. Eventually, through persuasion, the scammers convince their targets to shift their investments over to other purported platforms, which the scammers control. The investments are never returned.
One woman reported losing her entire life savings—roughly $288,000—to a man she thought was helping her profit from the nascent cryptocurrency boom. “Once I realized I had been scammed, I tried to contact him but couldn’t find him anywhere,” she told CNBC.
The FBI has called this type of scam a “significant threat.” In an interview with CNBC, Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of San Francisco and Sacramento field offices, said there’s recently been a surge in this fraudulent activity on the platform.
LinkedIn has acknowledged the problem. “Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rise in fraudulent activity happening across the Internet, including here on LinkedIn,” Oscar Rodriguez, the company’s senior director of trust, privacy and equity, wrote in a…
