LinkedIn has a trust problem.
The platform is built on the assumption that professional profiles are who they say they are. Most of the time, that is true. But it is also exactly why scammers, fake recruiters, and harassers choose LinkedIn over every other platform — because people lower their guard there in a way they never would on a random website or cold email.
LinkedIn Scam Checker exists to fix one part of that problem: giving professionals a way to check a profile before they engage, and a place to report it when something goes wrong.
What this site is
LinkedIn Scam Checker is a free, community-powered database of reported LinkedIn profiles.
Anyone can look up a LinkedIn profile URL and see whether it has been reported — how many times, and what the reporters described. Anyone who has experienced harassment, fraud, or a scam can submit a report with the profile URL and a description of what happened.
That is it. No fees. No login required to search. No algorithms deciding what is shown or hidden. Every report submitted is stored and returned when someone looks up that profile.
The goal is simple: if someone has been reported as a fake recruiter, a scammer, or a harasser, the next person they approach should be able to find that out before they respond.
The Chrome extension
The Chrome extension takes the database into LinkedIn itself.
When you install the extension and browse LinkedIn profiles, it automatically checks the profile you are viewing against our database in the background. If the profile has been reported, you see a warning directly on the page — before you accept the connection request, before you reply to the message, before you click on anything.
You do not have to remember to go to a separate site and look someone up. The check happens automatically, inline, every time you view a profile.
The extension is free. It connects to the same database that powers this site. Every report submitted here improves the warning system for everyone using the extension.
Why you have to sign in to report
Searching the database is open to everyone. No login required.
Submitting a report requires a sign-in. This is not about collecting your data — it is about making sure reports are traceable to real people. Anonymous reporting at scale turns into a tool for harassment. Requiring authentication means every report has an accountable source behind it, which makes the database significantly more trustworthy and harder to abuse.
The reporting limits — and why they exist
To protect the integrity of the database, every account has hard limits on how many reports they can submit:
- 5 reports per day
- 10 reports per week
- 30 reports per year
These limits apply both to your account and to your network connection independently — whichever limit is hit first applies.
These are not arbitrary numbers. They exist because a reporting system without limits is an attack vector. A bad actor who wants to harass someone could create an account and flood the database with false reports about a competitor, an ex-colleague, or anyone they dislike. The limits make that kind of coordinated abuse economically unviable — you simply cannot submit enough false reports to do real damage before the limits stop you.
Thirty reports a year is still meaningful for a genuine user. If you have genuinely encountered thirty scammers or harassers on LinkedIn in a year, that is a real and reportable number. But it makes mass false-reporting campaigns functionally impossible.
Why accounts with 50,000+ followers cannot be reported
This is the decision that surprises people most, so it deserves a proper explanation.
Profiles with over 50,000 LinkedIn followers are not eligible to be reported through this platform.
The risk-reward argument.
Think about it from the perspective of someone with 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. They have spent years building that audience. Every post they make reaches tens of thousands of people. Their name carries weight. Their reputation is a professional asset worth far more than anything a scam would yield.
The risk-reward ratio of scamming someone — for a person at that level — is terrible. The potential gain from a single scam is orders of magnitude smaller than what they stand to lose if it came out. And on LinkedIn, with that many followers, it would come out. Immediately. Publicly. Permanently.
Scams and harassment on LinkedIn are overwhelmingly concentrated among accounts that have less to lose — newer profiles, accounts with fewer connections, profiles where there is no established reputation at stake. The 50,000-follower threshold is a rough proxy for "this person has built something real and has strong incentives not to burn it."
The false reporting problem.
High-follower LinkedIn accounts also attract a different kind of risk: jealousy and coordinated false reporting.
When someone has built a large following, they inevitably have critics. Competitors. People they disagreed with publicly. People who believe, rightly or wrongly, that the platform they got was undeserved. A reporting system with no protections for high-follower accounts is a tool waiting to be weaponised by anyone who holds a grudge.
Allowing a large audience to collectively false-report a public figure — with no way to distinguish those reports from genuine ones — would make the database untrustworthy and cause real harm to people who do not deserve it.
The 50,000-follower threshold is not a declaration that people with large followings are above suspicion. If a well-known LinkedIn figure commits fraud or harassment, the right channels are law enforcement, LinkedIn's own reporting system, and public documentation of the evidence — not a community database that anyone can submit to without verification.
What this platform is not
It is not a place to settle professional disputes, post negative reviews of companies you disliked working at, or air grievances about people who did not hire you.
Every report should describe a specific incident — a scam, a harassment instance, a fraudulent message, a fake recruitment attempt. Vague reports, retaliatory reports, or reports that describe ordinary professional disagreements are not what this database is for.
The limits and protections exist to keep it useful. A database of genuine scam reports protects people. A database full of grudges protects no one.
How to use it
*To check a profile:* paste any LinkedIn profile or company URL into the search bar on the homepage. You will see how many reports exist and what they say.
*To report a profile:* sign in, paste the LinkedIn URL of the person who scammed or harassed you, and describe what happened. Be specific — the more detail you provide, the more useful the report is to the next person who checks.
*To use the extension:* install the Chrome extension and browse LinkedIn normally. The extension checks every profile you view automatically and surfaces warnings when a match is found in the database.
If you have been targeted by someone on LinkedIn and the report helped someone else avoid the same situation — that is the platform working exactly as intended.