World’s biggest digital professional network LinkedIn filed a lawsuit on Thursday against software company ProAPIs and its CEO, claiming that the firm unlawfully created hundreds of thousands of fake accounts used for scraping millions of LinkedIn member profiles.
In a lawsuit filed in a Northern California federal court, LinkedIn says that ProAPIs, along with its CEO Rahmat Alam, sell their scaping services to others – for example, by renting them out for up to $15,000 per month.
The firm allegedly operates a network of millions of continuously-created fake accounts, used to scrape LinkedIn member, company, and school data, as well as member posts, reactions, and comments. This way, they scrape information posted on LinkedIn by real people, which otherwise might be hidden behind LinkedIn’s password wall.
Although the platform’s security systems detect and restrict such accounts within hours of their creation, it still allows them enough time to scrape hundreds of profiles, LinkedIn says. On top of that, the firm registers “hundreds if not thousands of new accounts per day,” recently increasing the number of generated fake accounts.
ProAPIs offers “real-time, detailed data for individual and company LinkedIn profiles” that is “comprehensive” and “up-to-the-second,” however, it doesn’t disclose how exactly it gets access to that data.
In addition, LinkedIn also accuses ProAPIs of using its trademark on their site, which can give a false sense of association between the companies.
LinkedIn cites its User Agreement, which prohibits data scraping by automated bots, as well as impersonating others or creating fake accounts. It stresses that such scraping puts their users at risk, as their information can end up in any number of databases and be used for any purpose.
“Neither LinkedIn nor its members can then prevent Defendants or their customers from using that scraped data to send spam, from selling or exposing member data to scammers, or from combining LinkedIn member data with other data to create extensive private databases, among other activities,” LinkedIn says in a lawsuit.
The company seeks actual and exemplary damages for harming LinkedIn users and jeopardizing its reputation.
In August, a Discord message-scraping service claimed to have obtained billions of user messages and a trove of voice sessions, files, and user profiles, offering that data for sale.
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