I didn’t really think a whole lot when I saw a couple of LinkedIn invites in my Gmail box this morning. I just got on with the day’s work. It wasn’t until I was gchatting with our IT Director, and he remarked that he was trying to find out who the two people who’d LinkedIn friended me were that my suspicions were raised, and I went to the website and checked their LinkedIn profiles.

Both claimed to work here.

In my department.

I’ve been here for a year and a half. The company is maybe three years old. These names? Ringing no bells. But on the “Connections” page, I noted they’d connected with several members of our sales department. So I dashed off an e-mail to our head of sales — Do you know these people?

He replied: Who the hell are they? Remove them!

I called our group in India, and spoke to our manager there — I figured it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that these accounts were created by some of our people over there, and that they’d chosen to anglicize their names for whatever reason. Nope, not us. We use our own names on our LinkedIn pages, I was told.

I sent out an e-mail to the whole company: Don’t add these people.

The CEO wrote back: Ask [Director of My Department] and [Director of Q/A].

Mystery deepened when the IT Director messaged me: They’re listed in Exchange.

In other words, they have company e-mails.

Finally, [Director of Q/A] arrived. I wrote the names down, showed them to him: do you know these people?

Nope. Who are they?

No clue, I told him. At that point he snatched the stickit back from my hand.

Wait! I do! The accounts are generic fakes, for the use of company employees in order to search LinkedIn more efficiently. They’re also business upgraded, since upgrading each employee’s personal LinkedIn for work use would be cost prohibitive.

And of course, once these fake accounts were created, no one bothered to tell anyone about them.

Classic.

(Well, clearly, someone knows about them if they’re going around sending out connection requests).