Social media giant LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit alleging the unauthorised scraping of millions of its member profiles, claiming that the defendants operate a ‘vast network’ of fake accounts to gain access to user data.

Filing its lawsuit in a California federal court, LinkedIn said that software firm ProAPIs, along with its CEO Rahmat Alam, had created an ‘industrial-scale fake account mill’ that registered millions of fake accounts.

The court documents say these were used to scrape member, company, and academic data, as well as members’ posts, reactions, and comments, some of which is only available behind LinkedIn’s password wall.

According to LinkedIn’s complaint, ProAPIs ‘rented out’ these scraping services to customers paying as much as $15,000 (£11,150) a month, providing “real-time, detailed data for individual and company LinkedIn profiles”.

Accusing the software firm of unlawful behaviour, LinkedIn said that although it managed to restrict a high percentage of the fake accounts it claims were created, the defendants are alleged to have persisted in registering “hundreds if not thousands of new accounts per day”. 

Such behaviour, said LinkedIn, is in direct violation of its User Agreement and puts members’ data and privacy at risk. Highlighting the damage that data scraping could pose, LinkedIn said that once scraped, this data “can end up in any number of databases and end up used for any purpose”.  

“Our terms of service have always been clear on these issues: we do not permit members or third parties to scrape personal data and use it in ways our members have not agreed to. Additionally, you must be real – fake accounts are prohibited,” said Sarah Wight, LinkedIn’s VP for legal.

“We have filed numerous lawsuits against scrapers over the years – every one of them resulting in a judgment prohibiting scraping, including our most recent win against ProxyCurl.”

Seeking damages, LinkedIn also alleged that ProAPIs used its trademarks without authorisation, claiming that this provided a false sense that the social media platform was associated with ProAPIs’ business. 

LinkedIn said that the defendants’ alleged actions “have harmed and continue to threaten” the platform in multiple ways, including eroding trust and undermining the confidence of its members.

“There is no finish line in this fight to protect our members’ information. We will continue to build new safeguards to stop fake accounts and prevent scraping, and we will continue to take legal action when needed,” added Wight.

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This latest lawsuit marks a turn from earlier this year, when LinkedIn itself was accused of disclosing customer information to third parties for AI training.

In January, the platform was sued by some of its Premium customers, alleging that their private messages had been provided to third parties without permission to train its genAI models, following amendments to its privacy policies last year.

However, the lawsuit was dropped by the plaintiffs just nine days after filing, with Wight describing it as ‘baseless’ and false.