UPDATE: Isn’t it just amazing? I sent the request for linkedIn.com support to delete my tayo@spontaneousdevelopment.com profile at 13.05pm on 19th April 2013, and after failing to reply my previous email sent more than 24 hours earlier, I get a response confirming my request has been carried out at 13.11pm on the SAME day.

Wow! Talk about SELECTIVELY speedy response. Oh, by the way, she also added: “If you change your mind, just let us know”. Sigh…what a pity!!!

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It’s unfortunate, but this post has to happen – because the guys at LinkedIn.com seem unprepared to be fair and impartial in their dealings with me – for whatever reason. I’ve never been shy about voicing my opinion. And the last thing ANYONE can ever succeed in doing is put me down or intimidate me. Those who have had dealings with me know this for a fact. I also have a habit of going out of my way to help others I discover to be on the receiving end of any form of abuse, or unfair treatment.

As I type these words, I have not heard from them with regard to my request for details of the “suspicious activities” they claim they noticed in my account.

How difficult can it be to specify EXACTLY what it was they saw that was a violation of their terms of use?

I have asked them, they have not replied. I thought it had to do with the discovery I made this week – see below – but in the response they gave me, it is apparently not. Yet, they will not tell me what it is I did wrong.

Now what’s that about I ask???

Ever since I wrote my post titled “If You Can’t Find Me On LinkedIn.com, Here’s Why…” last month, I have patiently waited to hear from them about removing the restriction placed on my profile. This was after I’d sent the the copies of my passport as requested within 48 hours of receiving their email.

Guess what? A few days ago, I wrote to inform them I noticed I’d received a surprising email update via my olufeltks at yahoo dot com email address from LinkedIn.com.

As you will notice in the screenshot below, I noted that that was an account I’d opened over 10 years ago, and never used. It was therefore surprising that I was getting updates on it – it did not even have ANY data on the profile page!

Asking them to delete that old profile, I noted that the updates for that account and my real account at tayo at spontaneousdevelopment.com could have both been coming into my blackberry (since I setup my smartphone to receive mails from them).

I told them it was possible that was what they saw as “suspicious” activity in my account – since I may have clicked on a link on it accidentally before making this discovery that the notification was for a different address. Having said that, considering I’ve been using my blackberry with LinkedIn.com for over a year now, I expect a problem would have come up BEFORE now if the old account had been sending me messages like this.

The way I see it, this only began recently – possibly last month. I am VERY careful in dealing with such notifications – which is why in my first post on this last month, I was able to detect the scam LinkedIn notifications that I displayed in it.

Note that I also mentioned in my email to them, that in the 10 years since that profile was created I had NOT logged in even once – I did not even know it still existed and even if I tried I would be unable to recall the password.

More importantly, I only began trying to use LinkedIn for business about 3 years ago – via tayo at spontaneousdevelopment dot com

What really got me ticked off was the reply I got from the LinkedIn rep. She wrote back confirming she had deleted the yahoo! email based profile as I requested and then proceeded to REPEAT the same message they had originally sent me about the “suspicious” activity they claimed to have noticed in my real account.

What was worse, she then requested that I send a scanned copy of my passport to them: something I’d done and inserted screenshots of in my post dating back to 19th of March!

To cap it off, I’ve NOT heard a word from her since I sent an immediate reply. In that reply, I forwarded a copy of the mail I’d sent with the passport on 19th March, asking why she was AGAIN requesting me to send it, without even acknowledging the one I’d sent before!

Not one word from her up till this moment.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When I sent that first email on Monday 15th April telling them about the 10 year old profile, I got (as I have always gotten) an autoresponse confirming the email reached them). But when I sent my second email in which I pointed out that I got autoresponse confirmation when I sent in copies of my passport on 19th March, and that I was sure it reached them, guess what happened? THE AUTORESPONSE FOR THAT EMAIL NEVER CAME TO ME!

The Yoruba’s would say “Ejo eleyi oni owo ninu O!” Translated contextually, that means: “There’s more to this than meets the eye!“

As you will find from reading the screenshot copies of the 2 emails I sent them this week, I made it clear that if I did not hear from them, by today 19th April 2013, that this matter had been resolved, I would want them to delete my profile PERMANENTLY from their website.

This post is therefore meant to notify visitors to this website not to henceforth bother clicking on the LinkedIn.com share icons provided. I’ll be exploring ways to get rid of it. But in the meantime, please do not bother clicking on it.

One thing I’ve learnt from using the web is that it’s NEVER smart to put yourself in a position where others can dictate what happens to you. That’s why smart people don’t set themselves up to be messed up by the next Google algorithm overhaul.

In my honest opinion, I believe these guys made up their minds I was guilty without even trying to verify if that was so. They took action without regard for the impact it would have on my image as a person promoting myself and my products for others to buy from me.

That’s unfortunate. Like they say in my language (Yoruba), there are many routes that you can follow to get to the market:

I no longer wish to follow the LinkedIn route. Period.

Below: Screenshots from the emails exchanged with the representative this week:

 

 

 

Final Words

Did you notice that in her first – and only – response above, she said she looked forward to my response in order to further assiste me.

Well, like I said  above, when I responded this time around, protesting that I had proof that my email bearing image copies of my passport had reached them last month, no autoresponse came, and she has not replied since.

This is exactly what happened last month (see my first post on this), when I sent the passport images the first time. They never replied – even though I go the autoresponse. And they still did not reply when I wrote a follow up 2 weeks later , to which I also go an autoresponse. A screenshot copy of that follow up email is provided  my first post on this issue.

Like I said above: “Ejo eleyi oni owo ninu O!“

I’m done here