In the last three days I have received 3 invitations to connect with total strangers on LinkedIn – in and of itself, that’s not all that unusual. I often receive invitations from strangers to connect on LinkedIn – most I quietly ignore.
What made these invitations different was the fact that they were all worded identically – they all said:
Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.
This wouldn’t be all that unusual if that were the default text provided by LinkedIn when you request to connect to someone, but it is not. When you normally try to connect with someone on LinkedIn, it sends the text
I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn
Maybe LinkedIn are trialling the new wording and only certain people get it when they try to connect with people.
Maybe, it is being trialled only in certain regions.
Maybe you get this wording when you chose a different type of connection request.
Or, and I suspect this is the case, this is a new type of spambot trying to gain connections on LinkedIn.
None of the three accounts had more than 7 connections. None had filled out their profiles and none had any shared connections with me.
I guess there is a chance that this is default text, for new accounts only, on LinkedIn.
However, I have to think it is spam – be warned and don’t connect to anyone whose invite has this wording
Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn
unless you know them extremely well and even then, confirm with an email before accepting, just to be sure.
You have me thinking and doubting myself now Tom. If somebody had asked me about the default greeting for LinkedIn connection invites I would have said “oh yeah, it’s that since you’re a person I trust…”
However, I just checked my trash now and I see that the last couple of invites I received have the text that you outline above. I really could swear that I saw the “trust” line for a long time, from genuine contacts. Perhaps it was all a prophetic dream? 🙂
Ii could be that that may have been the default text a number of years ago Jonathan – and whoever created this spambot (if that’s what it is) didn’t realise it had updated!
Btw, good to see you found the new site – quick q if you don’t mind – how’d you come across it? I have re-directs on the old site and the old RSS feed but now that I think about it, I haven’t updated FaceBook or other sites to see this site yet!
Twitter feed brought me in. 🙂
I’d say you probably hit the nail on the head with the spam bot taking text from once upon a time. It always stood out in my mind as a very unusual opening line, which is probably why I haven’t noticed the change to the somewhat tamer version.
Actually now that I go looking for the offending Tweet I don’t see it. Perhaps it was a Tweet via somebody else of this post. Hmm…
It must have been something like that Jonathan, I didn’t mention it on Twitter!
It reminds me of the old Groucho Marx quote:
“I just don’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”
But seriously, any message saying “since you are a person I trust”, and coming from someone you’ve never met, has got to be treated with suspicion.
I’ve been getting a ton of these this week, and a few from Brazil. I would think LinkedIn could pick up on these easily since the wording is so precise.
The thing they all have in common is the surprising lack of connections, and they seem to all be foreign. The line itself I found jarring when I first saw it. After seeing that the person has between one and nine connections, and knowing I have no clue who they are, I’ve reported them as spam. I got one today who linked her Twitter account. It was an active one, with recent tweets, and with a decent number of followers and those she was following. The most recent tweet was that she’d just opened her LinkedIn account and inviting a connection. I let her know via Twitter that this line in her connection request is one that’s associated with spammers. Let’s see if she takes the hint.