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Humans and technology
THE 1,000 CHINESE SPACEX ENGINEERS WHO NEVER EXISTED
LinkedIn users are being scammed of millions of dollars by fake connections
posing as graduates of prestigious universities and employees at top tech
companies.
By
* Zeyi Yangarchive page
September 7, 2022
Ms Tech | iStock
If you were just looking at his LinkedIn page, you’d certainly think Mai
Linzheng was a top-notch engineer. With a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua,
China’s top university, and a master’s degree in semiconductor manufacturing
from UCLA, Mai began his career at Intel and KBR, a space tech company, before
ending up at SpaceX in 2013. Having spent the past eight years and nine months
working in the human race to space, he’s now a senior technician.
Except all is not as it seems.
Upon closer inspection, there are plenty of red flags: Despite having been in
the US for 18 years, Mai has written all his job titles, degrees, and company
locations in Chinese. His bachelor's degree is in business management, even
though his alma mater, Tsinghua, only offers that degree to student athletes,
and Mai was not one. Besides, the man in his profile photo looks younger than
Mai’s stated age. The image, as it turns out, was stolen from Korean influencer
Yang In-mo's Instagram. In fact, none of the information on this page is true.
The profile of “Mai Linzheng” is actually one of the millions of fraudulent
pages set up on LinkedIn to lure users into scams, often involving
cryptocurrency investments and targeting people of Chinese descent all over the
world. Scammers like Mai claim affiliation with prestigious schools and
companies to boost their credibility before connecting with other users,
building a relationship, and laying a financial trap.
Since last year, such activities have been steadily on the rise on LinkedIn,
following years of proliferation on other social media platforms and dating
apps. In the second half of 2021, LinkedIn removed 7% more profiles because of
fraudulent identities than in the six months before that, according to Oscar
Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s senior director of trust, privacy, and equity.
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“This is not normal. This is not healthy.”
“Scammers are highly sophisticated and proactive in terms of how often they
adapt tactics,” he says. For instance, a week after the Biden administration
announced its student loan forgiveness plan, LinkedIn started seeing scammers
incorporating the news into their scripts.
By now, victims have lost millions of dollars through scams that originated on
the platform. This summer, the FBI announced it would investigate these scams
and work with victims to identify the bad actors and disable their accounts,
even though the financial losses are almost impossible to recover.
Scammers “are always thinking about different ways to victimize people,
victimize companies,” Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San
Francisco and Sacramento field offices, told CNBC in June. “And they spend their
time doing their homework, defining their goals and their strategies, and their
tools and tactics that they use.” He called the work of these criminals a
“significant threat.”
A SPACEX “EMPLOYEE” INVITED YOU TO CONNECT
At one point in July, there were over 1,000 LinkedIn profiles for individuals
who, like “Mai Linzheng,” claimed to have graduated from Tsinghua University and
to work at SpaceX. The eye-popping number even triggered patriotic Chinese
influencers to lament the brain drain and accuse Chinese university graduates of
disloyalty to their country.
This caught the attention of Jeff Li, a Toronto-based tech influencer and
columnist at Financial Times China. He confirmed on July 11 that he could find
1,004 Tsinghua graduates by searching for SpaceX employees on LinkedIn; this
would have made the alumni group the largest at the company. But many accounts
he saw claimed the exact same education and work experiences—suggesting that
someone was mass-generating fake profiles.
“They all graduated from Tsinghua and went on to the University of Southern
California or similar well-known universities,” Li says. “Besides that, they all
worked at a certain company in Shanghai. Obviously, I suspect these are fake,
generated data.”
(SpaceX did not reply to a request from MIT Technology Review to confirm the
number of Tsinghua graduates working at the company.)
This wasn’t the first time Li had noticed what he thought were fake LinkedIn
accounts. Starting in late 2021, he says, he started seeing profiles with less
than a few dozen connections—rare for real LinkedIn users—and with profile
photos that were always good-looking men and women, likely stolen from other
websites. Most appeared to be of Chinese ethnicity and to live in the United
States or Canada.
Around the same time, the phenomenon caught the attention of Grace Yuen, the
spokesperson for the Global Anti-Scam Org (GASO), a volunteer group that tracks
“pig-butchering scams.” Scammers involved in this practice, which started as
early as 2017 in China, create fake profiles on social media sites or dating
sites, connect with victims, build virtual and often romantic relationships, and
eventually persuade the victims to transfer over their assets. The scammers
themselves came up with the name “pig butchering,” comparing the intensive and
long-term process of gaining victims’ trust to raising a pig for slaughter.
In recent years, as China has cracked down on fraudulent online activities,
these operations have pivoted to targeting people outside China who are of
Chinese descent or speak Mandarin. GASO was established in July 2021 by one such
victim, and the organization now has nearly 70 volunteers on several
continents.
While these fake accounts are relatively new to LinkedIn, they have permeated
other platforms for a long time. “Scammers started moving to LinkedIn maybe
after dating sites tried to crack down on them, [like] Coffee Meets Bagel,
Tinder,” Yuen says.
In certain ways, LinkedIn is a great way for fraudsters to expand their reach.
“You might be already married and you are not on the dating sites, but you
probably have a LinkedIn account that you check occasionally,” says Yuen.
A scammer on LinkedIn may try to connect with someone through common work
experience, a shared hometown, or the feeling of living in a foreign country.
Over 60% of the victims who have reached out to GASO are Chinese immigrants or
have Chinese ancestry, which these actors lean on to evoke nostalgia or a desire
for companionship. The fake claims to have graduated from China’s top
universities, which are notoriously difficult to get into, also help scammers
earn respect.
While the pig-butchering scams targeting Chinese nationals are not the only kind
of fraud happening on social media platforms like LinkedIn, they are exceptional
for the amount of financial losses they have caused. GASO surveyed 550 victims
and calculated the median loss to be $52,000; in comparison, the median
financial loss from all types of fraud in the US in 2021 was $500, according to
the Federal Trade Commission.
And on average, LinkedIn victims in particular tend to lose more money than
victims of fraud on other platforms—oftentimes over a million dollars, says
Yuen.
“Unlike dating sites, which are where the first scam victims were coming from,
LinkedIn actually has a lot of information that’s really useful for the
scammers,” she says. “They know your earning potential based on the type of work
you listed.”
YOUR NEW LINKEDIN FRIEND WANTS YOU TO LEARN ABOUT CRYPTO
For one victim, a woman in her 40s who lives in Northern California and asked to
remain anonymous to protect her identity, it was the perpetrator’s claim to
share her background of working in accounting that made her accept his
connection request last summer. From there, they moved on to talking on WhatsApp
about their families, education, and careers.
“You just find there’s a good personality,” she says. “You just have things to
talk about, and you just feel like what the person says makes sense. Just like
you are making a new friend.”
Soon, the “accountant” started telling her about the earning potential of
cryptocurrency investments. Being a finance professional herself, she did her
own research and thought she understood what her new friend was talking about.
The scammer coached her to exchange $10,000 into crypto through Coinbase, a
common crypto exchange based in the US, and then to deposit the crypto assets to
a separate platform where she could make investments.
In the beginning, everything seemed fine. She could successfully withdraw her
investment gains from the crypto wallet, so she put in more and let it sit in
the account. But two months in, when she wanted to withdraw a larger amount, the
platform no longer let her.
Eventually, she found out that the investment platform her so-called friend had
suggested was a fake, set up just to trap people like her. She lost over a
million dollars in total.
The introduction of crypto is relatively new to these types of scams. The
traditional con often asks victims to complete a wire transfer to a fraudulent
bank account, join a gambling platform, or invest in assets like crude oil
futures.
But according to data collected by GASO, crypto emerged as a new way to funnel
money around January 2021 and is now used in 77% of the cases that the group
documented. Crypto is less traceable and more convenient for cross-border
transactions, and it involves fewer intermediaries like banks, which can
potentially warn victims of fraud risks. Since last year, over $1 billion in
crypto has been lost to scammers, a June FTC report shows—more than any other
payment method.
Similar to what the California-based victim experienced, targets are typically
asked to buy crypto through legitimate platforms, like Coinbase or Binance, and
then to unknowingly deposit the assets into the scammers’ crypto wallets, which
are disguised as investment platforms.
The methods, though, are already evolving. In October 2021, GASO noticed
operations getting sophisticated enough to involve a smart contract—a blockchain
program that automatically executes itself—through a phishing link that can
drain money not only from the victim, but also from whoever clicks on the link
shared by the victim.
A GLOBAL PUZZLE TO SOLVE
While the “pig-butchering” scams originated in China, they have increasingly
become a global operation.
The crackdowns at home have driven many criminal groups into Cambodia, Myanmar,
Laos, and other Southeast Asian countries where telecom fraud regulations are
less rigorous. New scammers are recruited from Mandarin-speaking communities
across Asia, sometimes having been lied to and trafficked to what have been
called “industrial-scale” scam headquarters.
By tracing fraudsters’ crypto wallets and tricking them into sharing their IP
and geolocation information, GASO has been able to determine that all the
LinkedIn scammers they’ve come across are located in Myawaddy, Myanmar, says
Brian Bruce, GASO’s chief operations officer. More specifically, they are
operating in a building complex called KK Park—the subject of an increasing
number of reports of individuals from other parts of Asia being trafficked and
forced to work in online schemes. This seems to suggest that this one criminal
group has, above all others, realized the scam potential of combining LinkedIn
and cryptocurrency.
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Our phones are being inundated with text scams. Some people are using humor to
fight back.
Yet the fact that such scams are run globally makes it hard to identify the
individual criminals and hold them accountable. Bruce says GASO is collaborating
with the FBI and the US Secret Service, and hopes to work with Southeast Asian
governments to find the culprits, but progress will be slow because of the
crimes’ cross-border nature.
US lawmakers are also calling on crypto platforms to step up. Just last week,
the House Committee on Oversight and Reform requested information from five
leading crypto exchanges—Coinbase, FTX, Binance.US, Kraken, and KuCoin—on what
they have done to combat crypto scams.
The responsibility, though, also falls on the sites where scammers hunt for
their victims in the first place. After several media reports about the rampant
scams on LinkedIn, the platform released a report in June that says it has been
able to detect 96% of fake accounts before the people behind them make any
contact with users.
LinkedIn does this through a mix of algorithms, industry expert suggestions, and
human user reports, says Rodriguez. It looks for behavioral signals, like
whether a new account immediately starts to message other users, and whether any
of these users block or flag the account. He also says LinkedIn is beta-testing
a feature that notes when an account was registered; it could “help [users]
understand that ‘Hey, this account I’m engaging with in a conversation just
registered two days ago,’” he explains. “Your attitude toward that conversation
may be different.”
To LinkedIn’s credit, Li, who confirmed the presence of fake SpaceX engineers on
LinkedIn, says this year he has noticed that scam accounts are being taken down
more quickly. “At the end of last year, the account might survive three or four
days; now they’re being taken down in hours,” he says.
But if anyone searches on LinkedIn today for SpaceX employees who graduated from
Tsinghua University, they are still likely to find around 200 results—including
“Mai Linzheng” and other scam accounts. Generally speaking, Rodriguez explains
that the platform prioritizes identifying fake accounts that are actively
engaging with real users; accounts that remain could have been dormant after
registration.
Some victims still hope the platform can do better and find more ways to warn
unsuspecting users.
“I trust people pretty easily. Unfortunately, [what happened] is a very, very
expensive lesson,” says the California woman who was scammed out of $1 million.
“I'm just hoping all the parties involved in this—not just the consumers but
everybody else—are on high alert.”
hide
BY ZEYI YANG
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