But many accounts he saw claimed the exact same education and work experiences-suggesting that someone was mass-generating fake profiles. 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. This caught the attention of Jeff Li, a Toronto-based tech influencer and columnist at Financial Times China. The eye-popping number even triggered patriotic Chinese influencers to lament the brain drain and accuse Chinese university graduates of disloyalty to their country. “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 connectĪt 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. 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. 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. By now, victims have lost millions of dollars through scams that originated on the platform.

Chinese whatsapp scams