The thousand Chinese employees that SpaceX didn’t know they had

In July 2022, on LinkedIn, there were at least a thousand users who could boast a work experience in SpaceXthe aerospace company founded by Elon Musk which is worth $ 125 billion.

All of these profiles, including numerous, had another thing in common: a degree from Tsinghua University which is located in Beijing, China.

Jeff Li first noticed, Financial Times China columnist who lives in Toronto. On LinkedIn, you studied the SpaceX page that collects (also) the number of people who work in the company (all those, of course, who have created a profile on the social network): there were 10,179 users. Of these, just over a thousand surprisingly claimed to have attended Tsinghua University. 10% of the total number of registered employees. A percentage that has aroused suspicion.

Many of them quoted also the same work experiences. And they followed the same path: after their studies in China, they flew to the US to continue their studies at the University of Southern California. “And then – Jeff Li told the newspaper Mit Technology Review – reading their resumes it seemed that everyone had worked in the same company in Shanghai. I started thinking they were fake accounts ”.

One of the suspected employees, engineer Mai Linzheng, even had a fake profile photo: it was stolen from the instagram account of Yang In-mo, a popular Korean influencer.

In short, those thousand employees probably never existed.

But why had their profiles been cloned on the social network dedicated to job applications and offers?

The most likely hypothesis is that those fake accounts were needed to organize scamsin many cases related to the sale of cryptocurrencies.

Attempts to ‘scam‘, scams in fact, happen all the time on Twitter, to the point of having pushed – among other things – Elon Musk to propose the acquisition of the social network. Many, on Twitter, pretend to take on the (digital) clothes of the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, using her own profile phototracing his username and perhaps adding fraudulently a fake blue tick to deceive the most distracted. And in the name of Musk, in fact, they invite other users to invest in virtual currencies. Non-existent business that has the sole purpose of extorting money.

In short, we often talk about Twitter ‘bots’ and fake Facebook pagesin particular those capable of undermining democracies, but it is good to remember that LinkedIn also has a lot to do in this regard: in 2021 the social network blocked 11.9 million fraudulent accounts during registration. Another 4.4 million were suspended later, before users reported them. And finally 127 thousand fake profiles were removed after the “red flags” of the subscribers.

The most common scams, on LinkedIn, concern illegal commercial activities but also invitations to make investments that promise earnings. It is in this cone of shadow that the fake Chinese SpaceX employees moved, using a precise technique: boasting experiences in important companies and studies in prestigious schools to gain credibility in the eyes of the victims they came into contact with. A strategy aimed at setting up a financial trap.

The odds of success, it seems, are high. There Gaso (Global Anti-Scam Org)which has been dealing with this kind of online scams since 2021, says that more than 60% of the victims are Chinese living abroad. Fraudulent accounts leverage nostalgia and a sense of belonging. Including in their fake resume a degree obtained from a prestigious Chinese university, which few can access, is a recurring element used to gain respect and credibility.

The robotic engineer is the profession of the future in Italy, according to LinkedIn

by Daniela Passariello

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Unlike the other platforms used for online scamslike social media for dating, LinkedIn offers something more: the information provided by users, who intend to expand their professional network and take advantage of new job offers, theoretically they correspond to the truth. And therefore the scammers, by accessing a certain profile, can get a precise idea, according to the job, the position covered and the seniority, salary or turnover of a particular person.

LinkedIn is already studying the countermeasures to stem the phenomenon. It would be under consideration, for example, ua new feature that will let anyone know when an account has been created. In this way, even the most naïve could become suspicious of a profile registered a few days ago. In addition, the social algorithm that identifies fraudulent accounts is increasingly effective. But it’s not perfect.

We did the same research carried out by Jeff Li: of the thousand SpaceX employees united by Tsinghua University, identified last July, There are just over 100 of them on LinkedIn today. Some fakes may still be in circulation: the social network, in fact, first begins to eliminate suspicious accounts that interact with other users, thus leaving out the ‘dormant’ profiles.