Like millions of people, I’ve been off Twitter for months now. I now spend much of the time that I used to spend tweeting and reading tweets on a different social network: LinkedIn. I suspect that I’m hardly alone here.

A second-order effect of my switch has been increased spam. If I’m more active on LinkedIn, bots and bad actors see me as a bigger target for their inane pitches, phishing schemes, and the like. Making matters worse, AI makes it even easier for spammers to do their thing.

It doesn’t take smart cookies long to recognize spam or a scam, but a little trick simplifies this process even more. I use fancy text in my profile name. As a result, when I post and comment, my name looks a smidge different than others’. See below:

Yeah, my name stands out a bit, but I realize the primary benefit when I receive messages like this one:

Note not one, but two, instances of ???? as my name. I soon removed “Katherine” and reported her to the LinkedIn safety team. If the app ever added filters à la Gmail or Outlook, then I wouldn’t even have to do that much. I’d just immediately route them to the spam folder

Simon Says

Anyone who doesn’t spend two seconds realizing this error isn’t worth keeping as a connection, much less doing business with.