China lures academics with bribes from fake LinkedIn profiles, Czech intelligence says

The Czech Republic’s national intelligence agency says China is using fake LinkedIn profiles to bribe academics to write favourable reports about China. 

The Czech Security Information Service wrote in their 2023 annual report that Chinese operatives are approaching academics on LinkedIn to gather “non-public” information about what is going on in the country’s political landscape. 

Chinese intelligence services “use cover profiles” from large headhunting or consulting companies based in Singapore or Hong Kong to get in touch with academics. 

They then request the academics to create reports and studies “in areas corresponding to China’s political interests,” for a “financial reward,” the report continues. 

The Chinese will also try to entice academics by offering them fully funded trips to China to go to state-sponsored events, creating a network of “contacts who feel indebted and may be inclined to support Chinese interests in the Czech Republic”. 

“Whenever the Chinese learn of an event in the Czech Republic where negative comments about China might appear, it begins to take systemic steps to obtain sensitive information about the location, content, and participants of the event,” the report said. 

A spokesperson from LinkedIn told Euronews Next in a statement that creating a fake account “is a clear violation of our terms of service,” their team focuses on removing fake accounts based on “internal anti-abuse systems”. 

A LinkedIn report says a combination of “automated defences” and manual investigations blocked 99.6 per cent of fake accounts stopped between July and December 2023 before users found and reported them. 

Similar tactics in UK, US

A report published by the US Department of Defence (DOD) in May accused Chinese state actors of creating fake profiles and “lucrative job solicitations” to target current and former public service employees. 

The goal is to “entice targets into divulging sensitive information or becoming recruited assets,” through a low-risk, low-cost tactic, that gets through other cybersecurity defences, the report continued. 

Any DOD employee is at risk, the report said, and, if compromised, these employees have the potential to “devastate national security by enabling technological replication, battlefield strategy countering and compromising of critical personnel”. 

Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, told the Guardian last October that over 20,000 British citizens have been contacted by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn. 

The goal, according to McCallum, was to get industry or technological secrets by stealing information from people by posing as recruitment consultants on the platform.