I have a LinkedIn stalker
In fact, if you are a woman on LinkedIn, you also have a stalker.
Yesterday I received an email from a guy who found me on LinkedIn. It read:
[Email transcribed below]
How are you ,
I have been on your linked-in profile for some days now admiring your beautiful face, I must say you caught my eyes , I am interested in communicating more and sharing more about me with you and hope to learn more about you too that is if you are single and interested in communicating further. I understand we don’t technically know each other but You look so radiant in that wonderful smile of yours.This is all new for me, it is the first time i would ever go against protocol of doing business only on the Linked-in website. I do believe everything is possible if we put our mind and heart together just like I believe that good things can be found in the least places and when we least expect. I do not just give out my personal details like email or phone numbers to people on linked-in or off it, but i am willing to make a compromise to communicate with you so here am i emailing you off the site because i really wanted to touch base with you.
However you may therefore wish to know that there is someone who truly admires you and that someone is Me. I hope no offense is taken, I understand the medium is a business networking medium and not a dating or social networking website and I don’t intend to use it for one. I will wait for your response soon hopefully. I am sending you a couple of recent pictures too just so you know what i look like.
Best Regards
Paul Wagner
Now, in reading this initially, I can see how you might think it’s sweet. Sincere, even. Especially because (and thank god for this) the pictures he sent were of his face.
I need to tell you though — receiving this email made me feel super violated. I felt awful and unsafe. You want to know why?
BECAUSE I DID NOT SOLICIT IT.
Nowhere on my LinkedIn (or any of my socials) do I say “BTW I’m single DM me, kay?” In fact, I’m not all that active on LinkedIn beyond helping to mentor newcomers in my line of work and fielding the odd recruiter.
But, you might say, he even calls out that it’s unorthodox for him to be using LinkedIn as a point of connection! And he seems genuine! And not at all like a stalker!
Except that this is not unusual behaviour for him.
Plot twist: his name is not Paul Wagner. It’s Jean Nadeau. And he’s sent this exact email to multiple women.
How do I know this? Well after I got over my initial shock and fear, I got mad. Really mad. I reported the incident to LinkedIn. Then I downloaded the photos he sent to me and I ran a Google image search.
First thing I found was a tweet from a woman with a screenshot of the exact same email sent to her last October.
Then I found a French website advertising him as a keynote speaker. With a link to his personal website.
His website has photos, but none are the exact ones he sent to me. It also has his email. His real email. So I Google searched it and found his LinkedIn account. There’s no photo on his LinkedIn account. He’s a 3rd connection of mine.
Still think his email is sweet?
In a way it’s kind of brilliant. He is using a different email address, a pseudonym, a different language (his native language is French) and is not reaching out to women he’s directly connected to. No one would know it was him. He would be able to reach out to as many women as he wanted to without being directly associated to it at all.
His endgame? Your guess is as good as mine.
When I was ranting about this to a friend, they asked me how I knew that this “Jean Nadeau” was the source of the emails. What if the person who sent the emails used this guy’s photos to frame him?
Now this is the most brilliant part of Jean’s plan. And his ultimate downfall. The thing is, the photos he sent to me don’t appear anywhere on Jean Nadeau’s public profiles. They aren’t on his website, they aren’t on his Facebook page, and there aren’t even photos on his Linkedin. If the person sending the emails wasn’t Jean Nadeau they would have used different photos. But the photos I did find of Jean Nadeau are of the same man in the photos sent to me.
Also, his being a native French speaker explains the grammar in his email.
It’s him, alright. And I’m taking the motherfucker down.
He’s using a fake name, a fake email address, and sending this exact email to multiple women. This is not a sincere individual looking to make a personal connection.
Here’s the thing: incidents like this are not harmless, and they are not unique. The first thing I did when I got this email was hide everywhere that someone could find my email address. His email might seem sane enough at first glance, but that does not mean that this dude is in his right mind.
Women deal with this stuff all the time. And we are constantly hearing stories that start with an email like this one where the woman ends up dead. It may seem dramatic, but this is our lives. There is so much fear that can be associated with interactions like this one.
I was trying to figure out if responding to him would make him more or less likely to go full stalker. Which words would I use? I felt responsible for his feelings and my safety. This isn’t flattering.
Even if he was sincere. Even if he is in full control of his mental capacities, he wouldn’t be going to such great lengths to remain anonymous.
When I received the email, I just wanted to let him down gently and block him from seeing my LinkedIn profile. But then I found out all this other context, and I didn’t want any other women to be targeted by him. This is my safety and frankly the safety of women everywhere we’re talking about here. I do not take that lightly.
Update: I heard back from LinkedIn’s safety team, and they’ve told me they have no intention of taking action. Their excuse is that since he sent me an email and did not message me directly on the LinkedIn website that there’s nothing they can do. Then they had the audacity to tell me to be more careful about who I connect with and give my information to, as if this was somehow my fault and not a violation on Jean’s part (even though I was never connected to him in the first place).
