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I found this email in my Gmail yesterday and it immediately looked odd to me. First of all, I’ve never received an email like this from LinkedIn, and secondly, most of LinkedIn’s correspondence originates in LinkedIn. (Makes sense, right)?
THIS IS NOT A LEGITIMATE EMAIL FROM LinkedIn
I went to the Help Center. (Go to your photo in the upper right corner, hover over your photo and click on Help Center at the bottom).
LinkedIn wants you to ask a question before submitting a ticket. Lots of questions can be answered through LinkedIn’s Help Center.
You can search for the question or issue you are having and then click on Contact Us at the top of the screen and LinkedIn will open up a ticket for you. The more complete the ticket, the better. If you have a Premium Membership you will most likely have a quicker response from LinkedIn.
Once I created and submitted a Support Ticket, I received an acknowledgement in my Gmail account.
A couple of hours later I had a response from LinkedIn both in my Gmail and in my Support History within LinkedIn’s Help Center. For your own protection, please note what LinkedIn says in their response.
This Security Footer, while not a total guarantee, will serve as a strong indicator that this email originated with LinkedIn and is not fraudulent.
As a result of this original email, I quickly emailed LinkedIn at phishing@linkedin.com to report the email.
Secondly, I changed my LinkedIn password; probably not a bad idea to do frequently, anyway. Note that the Security Footer shows here just as LinkedIn mentioned above.
There have been a lot of changes within LinkedIn lately and the original email actually could have made sense but when I thought about it, it didn’t. My advice is to hold off from clicking too quickly and try to discern whether a legitimate company like LinkedIn would ask its members to reveal their information.
Keep safe.
