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.