Scottish Elises

One for the Geeks.......................
My LINKEDIN account is sending invites to people I do not know.
They are not on any of my email contact lists, so it's not an automated mailing to all my contacts
I opened my Linkedin sent folder to see 10 emails to people who are totally unknown to me.
I have deleted them from my sent folder and changed my password in case my account has been hacked
Can you advise me of any further precautions I should take?
This problem seems widespread and LINKEDIN customer service don't appear to want to help others who have complained

Now then - might not be related but I tried to send a message last night to a contact and it failed....


ETA - just retried and no issues

Here's a non geek potential answer. Have you been looking at it on an iPad or similar? I noticed one morning I had 2 acceptances from people I didn't know and another couple of unknown invites in my sent folder. Thought the same as you but then found how it simply and stupidly incorrectly sends invites from slightly inaccurate scrolling.

Reminds me, I've never added my barely populated profle as a link to the thread on here.

LinkedIn has been pushing an auto-invite method when you log in. I steadfastly avoid it, I prefer to choose who I truly "know" as contacts, but the button layout is cleverly set to trick you to just use it.

But I wonder if this has harvested random contacts in some way?

One damage limitation method may be to post an update on your profile, as to what's happened, and then anyone you have wound up by inviting randomly will see this when they check your profile to work out "who the hell is this Iain Boag and under what shady circumstances do I know him...?!"

FWIW, my account seems to be behaving normally.

I suspect the accidental clicking is a possibility, but unless these people have any contact to you at all (i.e. they are connected to you via one or two links) I am not sure how they would pop up for you to accidentally click on them.

The only other possibility is some sort of side-stepping of the login process by a malicious agent on your machine or in the advertisements that pop up on the site (quite unlikely).

Are you confident that you always navigate to the "real" linked in?

You should probably actively log out of linked in when not using it, at least until you get to the bottom of it.

Cheers,
Robin

Perhaps unrelated but...

http://jobsearch.about.com/b/2013/08/02 ... -scams.htm

robin wrote:I suspect the accidental clicking is a possibility, but unless these people have any contact to you at all (i.e. they are connected to you via one or two links) I am not sure how they would pop up for you to accidentally click on them.

What happened to me Robin is they do a 'people you may know' list on the site which are connections of connections of connections.... etc. It was scrolling through this list - a lot of whom I didn't know - that I must have had fat finger syndrome.

Ah, I can see exactly how this might happen on a tablet device. Dangerous things, eh!

Thanks All

I have not been using an ipad to view LinkedIn
The invites appear to be sent to people via (1st/2nd Connections)
I suspect I have now confused the Sales Director of Voda as to why I sent him an invite ................he accepted!!
I will update my status with an apology for the random emails as per your suggestion Campbell
LinkedIn have responded by stating I must have invited these strangers into my world................
Robin - Your theory is similar to one Sanj suggested.
Sanj said change passwords on Yahoo and LinkedIn and run Malwarebytes - 5 suspect PUP files removed

We'll see if things improve