Warning! LinkedIn getting hit with spammers!

This morning, I logged into my LinkedIn account and found a lot of new "Connection Requests". I had been out of town for a couple of days, and while this is normal, something stood out as a little strange.

There were about 40+ invitations from people with all of their names in UPPER CASE. While it's not that strange to see this once in a while, I've never seen them all at once like this... so I started doing some digging... unfortunately, it wasn't until after I had accepted a bunch of the connections.

Here is what I found:

1. All of the connections came in on 5/21/2009.
2. All of the profiles had the company "Current: Social Media Business Strategist at Social Media Magic".
3. The profiles had the "Past: Business Development Officer at Vertical Partners".
   
4. Only a couple of the profiles had pictures or recommendations.
5. I reveiwed the profiles, and many of them had the exact same text... include work experience. (LinkedIn Tech team... here is the solution to banning them... duplicate content!)
6. I did a search for the following company names, and I think these are all duplicate content and spammers: * "Vertical Partners" * "Turnkey Social Networking"

Here is a list of some of the profile names that I found that seem to be duplicates/ spammers:

BARBARA DAVIS

BRIAN ANDERSON

CAROL MARTINEZ

CHARLES ANDERSON

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

DANIEL JOHNSON

DAVID HARRIS

David Wilson

David Winter

DONALD MARTIN

DOROTHY JONES

EDWARD HARRIS

ELIZABETH MILLER

GEORGE JACKSON

George Wright

Jack Lewis

Jack Taylor

Jack Thomas

Jack Walker

JAMES MILLER

John Allen

John Anderson

John Harris

John Morgan

John Roberts

John Saxon

john souza - ceo of social media magic and vertical partners.

John Thompson

John Walker

John Wright

LINDA DAVIS

MARGARET WILLIAMS

MARIA THOMAS

MARK BROWN

MARK WILLIAMS

MARY ROBINSON

Michael Johnson

MICHAEL THOMAS

Thomas Clark

Thomas King

Tony williams

Warning--- DO NOT ACCEPT THESE INVITATIONS!
If you have these in your inbox, alert LinkedIn, through stating "I don't Know" to these connections!
They are probably phishing or spammers, trying to get to your contacts and email address.

If you have accepted any of the above profiles into your network I recommend that you quickly disconnect from them, so that they don't have your email address. (On another note... I highly recommend using gmail because it quickly and easily kills spam! It's awesome!)



If you need to disconnect from a network member, here are the steps: (From Linkedin Help:)

To remove one or more people from your list of connections take the following steps below:

1. Click 'Contacts' in the left navigation bar of the homepage.
2. Click on the 'Remove' Connections' link in the upper right hand corner of the 'Connections' view.
3. Select the people you'd like to remove from your 'Connections' list by clicking on the box next to their names.
4. Click on the 'Remove Connections' button.
   

Connections will not be notified that they have been removed from your connections list. They will be added to your list of Imported Contacts just in case you want to re-invite them at a later date. Only the member that breaks the connection can re-initiate that connection.