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Weak Links in LinkedIn: Enhancing Fake Profile Detection in the Age of LLMs

Published: July 21, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2507.16860v1

By: Apoorva Gulati , Rajesh Kumar , Vinti Agarwal and more

Potential Business Impact:

Makes fake online profiles easier to spot.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made it easier to create realistic fake profiles on platforms like LinkedIn. This poses a significant risk for text-based fake profile detectors. In this study, we evaluate the robustness of existing detectors against LLM-generated profiles. While highly effective in detecting manually created fake profiles (False Accept Rate: 6-7%), the existing detectors fail to identify GPT-generated profiles (False Accept Rate: 42-52%). We propose GPT-assisted adversarial training as a countermeasure, restoring the False Accept Rate to between 1-7% without impacting the False Reject Rates (0.5-2%). Ablation studies revealed that detectors trained on combined numerical and textual embeddings exhibit the highest robustness, followed by those using numerical-only embeddings, and lastly those using textual-only embeddings. Complementary analysis on the ability of prompt-based GPT-4Turbo and human evaluators affirms the need for robust automated detectors such as the one proposed in this study.

Country of Origin
🇮🇳 🇺🇸 India, United States

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Social and Information Networks