LinkedIn is asking your old colleagues to confirm you are real

Making a convincing fake professional used to take effort. Now it takes a prompt, a generated headshot and an afternoon, which is why LinkedIn announced a set of new checks on 23 September.

The headline change is vouching. Someone who worked or studied alongside you can confirm that you were there during the period your profile claims. It is not a recommendation and says nothing about how good you were at the job, only that the history is real. There are conditions designed to stop the feature being farmed: the person vouching needs a verified profile, must have been connected to you for at least a year, and should have two-factor authentication on their account. Alongside it, administrators of verified company Pages can now strip people who falsely claim to work there out of the company's listed employees and search results, and LinkedIn is testing a setting that requires a work email before anyone can attach themselves to a company. The platform says its verification tools have been used by 115 million members and more than 700,000 companies so far.

This matters well beyond recruiters. Fake profiles are the front end of job scams, and the good ones are patient. We covered a campaign last week where the fake interview itself installed the malware, and a plausible work history is exactly what makes that first message land.

Treat a verified badge as one signal among several. The warning signs have not changed: an approach out of nowhere, a push to move the conversation to Telegram or WhatsApp, a request for identity documents early on, or an instruction to install a tool for the interview. That last one is the line. Tendvane's safety check goes through what is installed and running on your PC and flags remote-access tools and other extras you did not put there deliberately.