LinkedIn, a professional social network owned by Microsoft with more than a billion members, has filed a lawsuit against Delaware company ProAPIs Inc. and its founder, Rehmat Alam, for scraping data. Scraping refers to the automated extraction of profile information using bots or fake accounts. According to LinkedIn, ProAPIs has repeatedly violated the platform’s terms of service by creating more than a million fake accounts to carry out this activity.
This legal action comes after LinkedIn successfully fought a data breach in 2021, which initially raised concerns about a potential security issue. However, official investigations later determined that the compromised data was the result of scraping, not a direct security breach. Since then, LinkedIn has intensified its efforts against scraping by introducing three new mechanisms in 2022 to combat fake profiles.
The lawsuit, filed in California, accuses ProAPIs and Alam of openly violating LinkedIn’s terms of service. ProAPIs allegedly sold access to a tool called iScraper API, which was marketed as a real-time LinkedIn data fetcher. According to court documents, the firm charged up to $15,000 per month for 150 requests per second, suggesting an industrial-scale operation. Alam is also accused of using invalid credit cards to sign up for Premium LinkedIn accounts without paying for them.
In a statement, Sarah Wight, VP, Legal at LinkedIn, said the company continually invests in advanced technology and dedicated teams to stop unauthorized data scraping. She added that LinkedIn takes aggressive legal action when necessary to prevent the misuse of member information and has filed numerous successful lawsuits against scrapers over the years. This includes a recent win against ProxyCurl.
Through the lawsuit, LinkedIn is seeking a permanent injunction to prevent ProAPIs from scraping public data, the deletion of all scraped data, and payment of damages and attorney fees. While a decision is pending, the iScraper API status page indicates it is still operational, although it has experienced some short outages recently.
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