Me/Not Me

What do Peterson Hawk, Rosslyn Villanueva and Peter the Pumpkin Eater have in common? Answer: they are all fictional characters. Unlike the nursery rhyme character, though, the other two names mentioned are connected to profiles on LinkedIn. In fact, it seems that Rosslyn and Peterson may be fictional identities. Why do I think this? Here’s the story.

The aforementioned Rosslyn Villanueva sent me a link request recently, and because she purported to be an employee of the Conrad Hilton Foundation – a group I recently did some work with – I accepted. I have been in the habit of accepting invitations from LinkedIn users whenever I see a connection that seems logical, as I am a big fan of LinkedIn and the power of a wide-spread business contact network. Almost immediately, however, I received an internal communication from Rosslyn, inviting me to join a “new professional social network”, SalaryShark.com. Curious, I looked at the SalaryShark website. It seems legitimate, and there was nothing to suggest that I was going to be asked to pay money or help ransom someone from a small central African kingdom, but the landing page of the website didn’t really tell me all that much, particularly why it would be better than, say, LinkedIn! So I googled SalaryShark and that’s when the fun began. At the top of the list was a link to a September 22, 2014 posting by Cameron Davidson, (who appears to be a real person, by the way) titled “SalaryShark.com – is it a SCAM?”.

The thrust of Cameron’s post was that he had a similar experience to my exchange, and as he looked through the SalaryShark site he was struck by how attractive the members seemed to be. So, he put on his private eye hat and went to work “reverse Googling” some of the images of SalaryShark members (if you haven’t done this before we will explain how below). Surprise, surprise! He immediately found that several of the member profiles on SalaryShark were using hijacked photos of attractive people, in this case they were all women. From the examples he gave, as well as my own follow up, it appears that photos are being ripped from IMDB and other sites of B List actresses (i.e. they are attractive but you would not immediately recognize them) and used to create profiles to build the buzz for the website. Comments from others on this post make it pretty obvious that it is hardly an isolated incident

And, the problem is not only on SalaryShark, when I went back and performed an investigation on Rosslyn Villanueva, I found that (a) Rosslyn’s photo on LinkedIn is actually that of an actress named Vanessa Verduga, (b) the only significant Google results for a search of “Rosslyin Villanueva” are her LinkedIn and SalaryShark profiles, and (c) other than the aforementioned links she created, there is no evidence that there is anyone working at the Conrad Hilton Foundation by this name. I sent a note to a (very real!) contact at the Foundation to check this out and will post that result once I have it. Now that my curiosity was piqued, I went back and looked at another profile of a person who had recently connected on LinkedIn, Peterson Hawk. His photo also turned out to belong to someone else, and the dearth of information about Mr. Hawk, who allegedly has a Ph.D. from Harvard Law School and served on the Law Review there, suggests that he, too is a fictitious character. Mr. Hawk has not solicited me for anything yet, and now he can’t because I have severed the LinkedIn Connection.

So what’s the take-away from all of this? First and foremost, it seems SalaryShark may be employing, or at least tolerating fake profiles both on its own site and elsewhere as part of a strategy to increase membership. This sort of tactic can be valuable if you are looking to encourage advertisers or other paid supporters to spend some money with you, or if you are wanting to sell your online enterprise. I’m not suggesting that either of these strategies is the case with SalaryShark, but a quick look at one online tracking site shows that, although flatlining for many months, the site showed a visible spike in traffic starting around the second week in October. It’s curious to say the least, and in my opinion does not recommend SalaryShark as a place I would want to be connected with.

Second, this chain of events has definitely created an aura of caution that I will take moving forward when I am approached by a LinkedIn user for a connection. I hardly want to go back through the many connections I have already, but when a stranger asks to connect, I am likely now to send them a follow up note asking why I should join their LinkedIn network. And, I bet I will reverse Google more photos, too. About that – here’s what I’m talking about. If you see a photo and you want to find out any other place on the Web where the photo is posted, just follow the instructions posted by Google Support. It’s really easy. You might want to do this with photos of yourself, especially those you use on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google+. Who knows, you might be one of the beautiful people being used for some online “funny business”!