Thank you for sharing, I wish there was more awareness among people of the dangers of all these “useful” tools on the web, most of which is just for making someone extremely rich, not caring for the consequences of the effect on people’s lives. And I am not just talking about people who surf the web, much rather of people who do NOT..
I happened to stumble across your writing by googling “LinkedIn fraud” after I ran into something ridiculous regarding the system LinkedIn works along. Which, by the way, goes for all similar networking sites, due to the anonimity and ease of access to the worldwide web.

My story shows that it can go further than just a “nuisance” or lack of real use.

I lost my job some time ago and someone (most likely an employee from my last company whose salary had been reduced as an effect of the company crisis or any former employee I had to make redundant, due to the same crisis which eventually made me redundant as well..) has taken to abusing LinkedIn and registering under my name, with the only difference of one letter in the spelling of my name, which I had registered with originally.
In fact, the international spelling of my name is what the person used, thus if someone from a multinational is googling me or looking me up in LinkedIn, the fake name will come up first, not my real account.

In Hungarian, we have 9 more characters in our alphabet, on top of the english alphabet, which are just different formats of the letters “a”, “e”, “i”, “o” or “u”. We put these little accents and double-dots on top of the letters, thus the pronounciation is totally different (e.g. “á” differs from “a”, “ö” from “o”, etc.). It is common in the world in many languages, LinkedIn however does not seem to bother taking this into consideration for avoiding abuse..
Which is remarkable, as about 75% of people in my personal social networking circle have at least one of these odd characters in their names, 50% of them have two of these letters, which means FOUR different possibilities to register at LinkedIn for HALF of the Hungarian population! Imagine how much work this would mean for their Service Support if people start reporting abuse..
Not to mention: how do they know who the real Mr X. is?? Do I need to send a copy of my passport???

Now, this individual is trying to make my life miserable, as (s)he has indicated that I have filled a position with a competitive firm versus my previous firm. Of course this will not have any legal implications for me, as I obviously do not work there. It does pose a potential threat to me though when applying for new positions or if this person is putting in new information.

Now tell me: what can I possibly do to avoid anyone misuse of my personal information, if a provider like this does not care to protect people’s privacy, even of those who are not even registered??..
I agree it would be a costy feature to have everyone give a (home) mailing adress and send a (snail mail) letter physically with access codes and so on, to make sure it’s not some kid in a Philippines registering as former CEO of a Swedish firm, just for the fun of it, but let’s just think for a minute: would the profits not justify it?.. What is the profit loss in a letter? Exactly: the potentially missed opportunity. I’ve not seen many providers raising their barriers high, that’s for sure..

The problem is not what the system does not do, what it lacks.
The problem is the damage it does. When talking about people’s jobs, there is nothing worse than irresponsible “gadgets” on the Web, “for the common good”.

Good luck with the site!

Get real, all these “LinkedIn is great” comments are paid shills or naive individuals who signed up and now feel the need to justify all the spam they’re sending to their “contacts”. If I ever got a real request from a “contact” I met through LinkedIn, I’d tell the person who they are trying to contact not to trust that person with any secure or proprietary info as they are too stupid to avoid the LinkedIn scam.

Avoid them.

Come-on Tracey….you really get called by head-hunters? They should know by know it will take a personal jet and a seven figure deal to pull you away from Sequence<>. Enjoy the day!