LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit against Delaware-based company ProAPIs Inc. and its founder and CTO, Rehmat Alam, accusing them of scraping data from the platform using more than a million fake accounts.
According to the lawsuit filed in California, ProAPIs allegedly violated LinkedIn’s terms of service by using automated bots and fake profiles to extract user data on an industrial scale. The company is seeking a permanent injunction, deletion of all scraped data, and payment of damages.
LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft and has over a billion members globally, confirmed that ProAPIs repeatedly created fake accounts to harvest legitimate user information. The activity was detected and restricted through LinkedIn’s automated defenses.
ProAPIs is also accused of operating a service called iScraper API, marketed as a “real-time LinkedIn data fetcher,” which offered customers large-scale access to scraped data. Court filings reveal the company charged up to $15,000 per month for 150 requests per second, demonstrating the scale of its operation. Additionally, Alam allegedly used invalid credit cards to obtain Premium LinkedIn accounts without payment.
“We continue to invest in advanced technology and dedicated teams to stop unauthorized data scraping, and when necessary, we take aggressive legal action to prevent misuse of member information,” said Sarah Wight, VP of Legal at LinkedIn. “Every one of our previous lawsuits against scrapers has resulted in a judgment prohibiting scraping, including our most recent win against ProxyCurl.”
LinkedIn has intensified its crackdown on scraping since 2022, introducing new systems to detect and block fake accounts and bots. The company is now taking legal action not only against ProAPIs and Alam but also against Netswift, a Pakistan-based technical partner allegedly involved in the scheme.
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As of now, the iScraper API remains operational, though its status page shows intermittent outages in the past 24 hours. ProAPIs has not yet responded to LinkedIn’s complaint.
