LinkedIn sued ProAPIs and its CEO Rahmat Alam for running millions of fake accounts to scrape and sell user data, charging up to $15,000 per month.
LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit against the software firm ProAPIs and its CEO, Rahmat Alam, accusing them of creating millions of fake accounts to scrape and sell user data.
Defendants offer real-time, detailed LinkedIn data via a fake account network, renting scraping services up to $15,000/month. They access member-only information without permission, misusing LinkedIn trademarks to suggest endorsement.
LinkedIn claims the company run millions of fake accounts to scrape member, company, and school data. Although LinkedIn blocks most within hours, each can harvest hundreds of profiles, and the operators keep creating hundreds or thousands of new accounts daily to evade detection.
“Defendants operate a vast network of continuously-created fake accounts— numbering in the millions—that they use to log into LinkedIn and scrape LinkedIn member, company, and school data, as well as member posts, reactions, and comments. LinkedIn’s technical defenses regularly detect and restrict Defendants’ fake accounts within hours of their creation.” reads the lawsuit. “But in that time, each such fake account can sometimes scrape hundreds of profiles, if not more. And despite LinkedIn restricting a very high percentage of these fake accounts, Defendants persist in registering hundreds if not thousands of new accounts per day.”
LinkedIn sued to stop this illegal activity, protect platform integrity, and safeguard users’ professional identities.
The social media giant uses extensive technical and human resources to detect and block fake accounts and data scraping, ensuring the platform serves real professional connections.
The company states that the defendants’ data scraping overloads LinkedIn’s servers, with fake accounts making millions of requests far exceeding normal human user activity.
“Defendants’ conduct violates the User Agreement and the law. It violates the User Agreement’s prohibitions on “scrap[ing] or copy[ing] the Services, including profiles and other data from the Services,” among other provisions. Their fake account mill violates the prohibition on “Creat[ing] a false identity on LinkedIn, misrepresent[ing] your identity, or creat[ing] a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person).” Defendants were on notice of these conditions, agreed to them, and knowingly violated them in engaging in their prohibited conduct.” continues the lawsuit. “Defendants have also circumvented the many technical measures and barriers LinkedIn has in place to prevent such scraping activities, in violation of several state and federal laws prohibiting unauthorized access, as detailed in the causes of action pled below.”
LinkedIn warns that large-scale data scraping, fueled by AI, poses growing risks to consumer privacy.
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