Transcription
LinkedIn is weird. You probably haven't ever thought about it. After all, it's not really designed to be an enjoyable platform. And as such, most people only ever log in when they have to.
For me, LinkedIn only ever entered my life when I was between jobs. Otherwise, my profile remained inactive. Some people use it while they're actively employed, but usually because of networking the [music] platform enables is a part of their job in some way, or they maintain a presence with the intention of furthering their career in some fashion.
Either way, the culture on LinkedIn revolves around the corporate caricatures of ourselves we present to the professional world. That version of us that genuinely enjoys bringing value to [music] stakeholders. All social media revolves around deception in some way, but usually [music] it's more about presenting an idealized version of yourself. Not necessarily lying, but rather just not showing everything, only the good parts of yourself and your life.
The culture on LinkedIn, on the other hand, is specifically centered around lying. It's about the false enthusiasm you have to bring into the workplace. You don't care about making the company you work for more money. Yet, that's the attitude you have to bring to LinkedIn. This has made the platform feel much more fake than any other, to the point of being uncanny when you actually sit down and analyze it.
Everybody has the same smiling headshot as their profile picture. Everybody writes in the same learned, confident voice. Everything just kind of bleeds into each other and nothing at all sticks out. It's like driving through a forest and trying to keep track of the passing trees.
Despite this monotony, there's a lot to talk about with LinkedIn. The platform itself both operates very strangely and has endured many controversies over the years. The latest being a cyber crime problem that might be the largest out of any I've seen on any platform. There's also the LinkedIn addicts, the only honest people on the platform who are dangerously fanatical about it. Oh, and there's also the cult. But before we get to that, we've got to take a look at a single profile. Let me introduce you to Aegon Chilakian.
On the surface, this profile looks like any other one intended for a seemingly pretty educated and accomplished person. But the closer you look at it, the weirder things get. You wouldn't see it on a surface glance, but this page is an entry point into an insane rabbit hole that reaches both outside of LinkedIn and the internet itself, into a world of geopolitics that make conspiracy theories look like weekly weather forecasts.
You see, Aegon is not a real person. Except he is. He's a flesh and blood human being, but he also doesn't exist. Not in the way a normal person does, at least. Yeah, it involves AI, but it's much more than that. He's connected to a real world shady organization that has connections in the White House while at the same time explores esoteric practices that directly deal with the supernatural. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's take a closer look at Aegon's profile.
He has over 6,000 connections, but then again, he is a registered federal lobbyist for the American government, which would warrant such a large network of people. He's held that position since 2023. And around the same time, he apparently became a US registered foreign agent as well, which means that he's likely lobbying on the behalf of some foreign organization or state.
Things start becoming stranger when you explore his education section. He appears to be currently enrolled in many different programs at many different prestigious schools including the Harvard School of Business, MIT School of Management, the Warden School in Pennsylvania, Assada in Spain, Stanford School of Engineering, Oxford School of Business, Berkeley School of Law, MIT School of Engineering. I don't think I have to list them all, but in total, Aegon is currently enrolled in 26 different programs at universities in several countries.
His work history beyond his current job as a White House lobbyist is just as bizarre as his education. He's worked with the European Parliament, the Ukraine Project, and CERN, where he's published multiple papers as a particle physicist and apparently has won multiple awards for it. His longest job, however, was as a consultant in the executive office where he worked for 56 years.
This might seem like some weird joke. A fake LinkedIn profile somebody set up with as many qualifications as possible, but this couldn't be further from the truth. If you search Aegon Chilakion on Google, you'll find several articles published by mainstream media talking about a video address he made warning humanity of a possible extinction event caused by something called the Siberian magma plume. This particular piece was published by the Glob and Mail, a well-respected and prestigious newspaper here in Canada. [music]
But there is something weird about this article. You'll notice at the top a disclaimer that [music] explains to the reader that the following writeup is a press release published by a third party and is paid content that hasn't been reviewed by the Glob and Mail. Strange. The article also makes several pleas for the international community to release the restrictions they placed on an organization known as Elatra. Keep that name in mind.
Other than these articles, which mostly seem to focus on the same press release we just talked about, there's not really a whole lot else out there about Mr. Chilockian. There's a profile on a site called Academia.edu that features much of the same content as his LinkedIn profile. But you should keep in mind that just like LinkedIn, anybody can make an academia page. He also apparently has an account on YouTube. And this is where things get even more bizarre.
His channel is called EarthSafe Science Collective, and he's uploaded many long videos, and I don't mean like an hour or 2 hours. No, his longest video is a whopping 8 and 1/2 hours long. It's called the Impact Documentary, and the whole thing seems to have been generated with AI, both the voiceover and the visuals, with the main narrator being an AI version of Aegon dressed up as George Washington. The documentary warns of a powerful hidden enemy that's supposedly tirelessly working to dismantle global democracy using transformational terrorism with their end goal being to force a second civil war in the USA and establish a new world order. It's all standard alarmist conspiracy theory nonsense, but it also makes frequent and odd mentions of anti-cult organizations and how legitimate institutions like the EU's fris are actually somehow promoting terrorism by advocating for anti-cult attitudes in mainstream society.
The other videos on Aegon's channel appear to also be aided by AI in some way, like this video titled The Crossroads, where he eerily speaks for 3 and 1/2 hours straight without moving an inch. I said in the intro of this video that Aegon doesn't exist, but he also does. That's true. These videos contain Aegon's presence, but they also don't really depict a human. They're obviously mostly generated with AI in some manner. Aegon is a living, breathing person, though. Also on YouTube, you can find a televised interview he did at a 2024 UN climate conference, which involves no AI and proves that he is indeed a real person. One that's accomplished and respected enough to be in the position to do a TV interview at a UN event.
But his education history also can't be real. And there's barely any information about this supposedly important public figure on the internet outside a few recent paid press releases, a bunch of weird AI generated YouTube videos, and of course, his LinkedIn profile. What is going on? The rabbit hole keeps getting weirder the further you go down.
If we go to the website linked on his YouTube channel, you'll find a gallery of photos that shows Aegon with various prestigious people. They seem normal at first glance, but again, as you look closer, things start to seem off. In this picture of Aegon with a Harvard economics professor, you can see that the books in the background don't seem to have legible writing on the spines. They're either blank or have nonsense scribbles written on them. The most damning example is this photo showing Chilakian with his supposed colleagues, Maria Zuber, the vice president of research at MIT, and also an astronaut named Kate Rubins. There's clear evidence that both Maria and Kate were completely doctored into this photo. The real picture of them is this one, which comes from an MIT article and does not contain Aegon at all. You can line up Maria and Kate perfectly between both of these photos. And Aegon's doctored version was likely created with AI, judging on the smeary, chatty look of the image.
Chilakian's website also makes frequent mention of Elatra, that mysterious organization that seems to follow him around anywhere he is on the internet. And it's here where things really go off the deep end. Elatra presents itself as a volunteer-driven international public movement focused on studying natural disasters, geodynamic changes, and promoting discussions to solve the global climate crisis. They supposedly have participants in more than 180 countries, most of whom are scientists, experts, and other professionals. Again, like everything we've talked about so far, this all seems fairly normal on the surface, but not everything is as it seems.
Elatra is based in Ukraine and in 2023 their headquarters were raided by the military. Why? Because the organization, who the Ukrainian government had labeled an extremist cult, had been promoting Russian propaganda. Specifically stating that all Slavic people were destined to come together and form a single state who would be commanded by a savior-like figure, one who greatly resembled Vladimir Putin. In the raid, the authorities would seize Russian propaganda literature, documents depicting cult symbolism, portraits of Putin, large amounts of Russian currency, and several firearms.
You might assume that this is some Russian-backed propaganda machine, but things get even weirder if you can believe it. In June 2025, Russia themselves would also label Elatra as an extremist sect and would order all their activities to cease in the country. It's pretty rare for both Ukraine and Russia to agree on anything. Just what exactly was this group doing?
Let's back up a second. When Ukraine raided Elatra, they called it a cult. And they also found cult art and literature in the compound. They also found this: a big glass pyramid with a chair inside. This is where we start diving into esoterica. You see, Elatra believes in the supernatural. Specifically, they purport that humans have an innate ability to communicate telepathically, one that's never been properly unlocked. This energy pyramid device is part of an experiment set up by the site to prove that humans can do this.
>> We have gathered here today to conduct the first international pyramid experiment. The goal of which is to determine the possibility of transmitting information telepathically at a distance. We will choose one of the symbols randomly. The operator will look and memorize this symbol and then at 5:00 p.m. GMT, she will go into the pyramid and will be transmitting this symbol for half an hour. >>
Elatra made a whole video outlining this experiment. A woman is presented with a selection of 12 visual symbols. She chooses one and memorizes it. Then she gets into the pyramid and begins using it to transmit the symbol telepathically. She does this for 30 minutes. While she's transmitting, 1100 participants around the world attempt to receive the communication and submit the symbol they think is being transmitted. Supposedly, the experiment was a success and the correct symbol was the most commonly chosen option.
Look, I could go on for a long time about Elatra. There's been accusations of assault against its founder, allegations of harassment, threats, and smear campaigns against its critics, but this video is about LinkedIn. We kind of got away from that. Let's reel it in.
Aegon Chilakian is a mysterious man to pin down. Everything he does seems to be half lies and half truths. But one thing he most certainly is is a foreign agent lobbyist in the White House working for Elatra. That's true. You can find publicly available proof of that on the internet. His other activities and qualifications though are questionable.
In the 1970s, the SEC issued a violation order against Chilakian for misrepresenting his education and employment history. And remember those academic papers he posted to his LinkedIn? They weren't written by him. They were stolen from a scientist with a similar name, Arpane Chilakian. He also claimed to have worked for CERN. But when asked about it, CERN came back and said that they had never heard of him. Almost everything surrounding this guy has been proven to be fake or just unsubstantiated. Except for the fact that he is indeed a lobbyist working on the behalf of Elatra.
Aegon is not the only person connected to Elatra in the White House. Pastor Mark Burns, Donald Trump's personal spiritual adviser, is a member of Elatra. There's a video and article on their website where he repeats many of Aegon's talking points alleging that the anti-cult movement is actively harming people. Again, this is the president of the United States' personal spiritual adviser repeating the talking points of a cult that believes in human telepathy.
To wrap this up, here's my personal theory. And to be clear, this is just my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. Judging based on the contradicting information and substantiated evidence of multiple cases of falsified credentials, you could fairly assess Aegon as a sort of con man. I think he was picked up at some point in the last couple of years by Elatra and they helped fill in the blanks to make him come off like some important figure, which is evidenced by the very little information about him that exists outside his lengthy LinkedIn profile. They then used him, a native-born American, to act on their behalf as a lobbyist in the White House. The agenda he's pushing likely reflects the talking points you can gather from his AI generated YouTube videos. Climate catastrophes, impending doomsdays, and putting an end to anti-cult attitudes around the world. As for Elatra themselves and what their motivations may be, I have no idea. As much as I'd like to get into that, it would be a whole other video on its own.
Aegon's profile on LinkedIn remains one of the strangest on the site. It reflects a man that only half exists. One that is made of flesh and blood, but not of the history he claims to have. He can be seen with your eyes, but most of what you can see of him are AI fabrications. The only real thing about this man is his advocacy for a bizarre and powerful cult.
Believe it or not, Aegon is not the only fake person we're going to talk about today, and Elatra is not the only cult either. LinkedIn is full of weird things, and I'm surprised people don't talk about it more often. Like I said, it operates much differently than other social media platforms. And when it comes to terminally online social media addicts, LinkedIn fanatics in particular are very unusual.
When you imagine a typical terminally online social media user, the archetype likely varies depending on the platform you're thinking of. An Instagram addict might be an aspiring influencer, someone who tries to present their life in an exaggerated manner, acting more rich and successful than they actually are. A typical Twitter addict, in my mind, is inseparably tied to politics. Either a groper or a tankie with a bunch of flags next to their username. Both sides constantly spouting off insane opinions that have been shaped by the false online reality they live in. Your average Facebook addict is a boomer conspiracy theorist who isn't very good with technology and likely engages with AI generated content.
Either way, regardless of how unhinged your everyday social media addict may seem, they're still using their respective platforms in the way they were intended to be used. Like it or not, social media in general was specifically designed to be as intrusive in people's lives as possible. The individuals who run these platforms want you to become insane and detached addicts who live their lives on the internet. That's how they make money, by reeling you in as much as possible.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, is not a conventional social media platform. It's not designed around spouting off personal opinions or being used for fun at all really. It's not social media. It's professional networking media. As such, you wouldn't expect it to be as addictive as other social networking platforms, at least not on the surface.
When the platform first launched in the early 2000s, it filled a gap that hadn't been addressed previously by any platform at the time. It combined job listings with some light social media features like profiles and connections, allowing for not just quicker job applications, but also networking between professionals, which traditionally only ever happened in real-world events. For its first 10 years, LinkedIn was only designed to be a networking and job application tool.
As the 2010s rolled in, things would begin to change a little. LinkedIn would go public in 2011, and the pressure to grow as a company would begin to drive the platform's direction. LinkedIn was useful, but it couldn't draw people in the same way Facebook or Twitter could, and that was a problem. People only used it when they needed a job. Nobody was logging in every day the same way they would with a conventional social media platform. Less time spent using LinkedIn meant less money for the company and subsequently less growth. If the platform wanted to keep up with its contemporaries, it would need to shift its mission.
In a 2012 letter to shareholders, CEO Jeff Winer would share his new three-word strategy for the company: "Simplify, grow, everyday." The "everyday" part of that was specifically in reference to getting users to use LinkedIn every day, just like any other social media platform. The business logic behind this makes sense, but how exactly do you get people to use a job application site every day?
LinkedIn's mission statement as a professional networking and job application tool would never actually change, but they would sneakily start to add in more conventional social media features as time went on. They'd introduce a Facebook-style infinite scroll newsfeed filled with posts from people you're connected with. They'd start tracking the amount of time a user spent looking at a certain post and the different engagements they had with it. Based on that information, they'd start inserting recommended posts from strangers into your newsfeed. This not only made LinkedIn function much like any other social media site, but it also allowed users to gain significant organic followings on the platform, giving rise to a very strange sort of influencer.
The way LinkedIn solved their "everyday" problem was by purposely molding the sort of content they wanted users to share on the site. Not necessarily life updates like Facebook or interesting random pieces of information like Twitter, but rather career advice and educational content. The problem is there's only so much career advice people can post every single day. Humans are simple creatures and we have a tendency to engage with social media in the same manner no matter what the platform is. This results in the average LinkedIn post being a strange mixture of personal and career-focused content with the two sides mixing into each other much like milk that's been freshly poured into a mug of coffee.
>> I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. Here's what it taught me about business-to-business sales. >> In this post, you'll find a long write-up detailing the supposed career lessons this man learned from planning a marriage proposal to his partner. In it, he compares the ring to an enterprise product and his girlfriend to a business he's trying to sell to. Getting down on one knee, that's a product demo. Her saying, "Yes," you close a deal. Good job, buddy. This sort of career lesson from a life experience is typical of LinkedIn influencers. It seems like a subconscious solution people have congested themselves into using to adopt LinkedIn as a conventional social media platform to overshare personal experiences while also somehow keeping it in the corporate realm. By definition, your career life is supposed to be separate from your personal life. So mixing the two in the way LinkedIn influencers do is just sort of off-putting and leaves a bit of a gross taste in your mouth.
>> I peed the bed on my honeymoon. Not exactly one of my proudest moments. >> What's the business lesson here, you might ask? It's about not taking yourself too seriously and embracing humanity as a team leader. >> If you can survive peeing the bed on your honeymoon, you can survive anything business throws at you.
Another aspect to LinkedIn is hustle culture, not just for the people running their own companies, but for the employees of other businesses as well. It's seen as a good thing on LinkedIn to overwork yourself to bring value to shareholders. In the intro of this video, I mentioned that this sort of attitude is a common lie people have to purport to be able to survive in the corporate world. On LinkedIn, though, people who sincerely think like this seem to get elevated, and a sort of corporate Stockholm syndrome is a key part of the platform's culture. This also leads people into passionately defending all billionaires and rich people against any and all criticism.
Everyone is talking about the Polish CEO who grabbed the hat from the boy at the US Open. I just saw he came out and apologized. While it wasn't the best look for the CEO, I think this was a missed life lesson for the boy. You can't expect to have everything handed to you.
>> This is the archetype of an average LinkedIn fanatic: a workaholic wage slave who's thinking about bringing value to the shareholders during their life's most important moments and kissing the feet of the billionaires who would never even give them a second glance. It's gross and off-putting, but not really disturbing or scary. So, why am I talking about it?
You see, this very specific blend of personal life with work and subservient attitudes made LinkedIn fanatics the perfect recurring targets of a secretive organization that caused a lot of harm to many people. One that would have an official presence on the platform. Consider, if you will, the following LinkedIn profile. It's for a man named Keith Raniere, a self-described independent education management professional based out of upstate New York. On the surface, this profile looks like any other, but you'll notice it's missing a few details. There's no profile picture, no job history, and no posts. Despite this, Keith still has a large network of connections. It almost seems like his profile was purposefully gutted at some point, perhaps in an attempt to cover something up.
Back in 1998, Keith had started a company with his friend Nancy [music] Salsman. The business offered something called Executive Success Programs, a set of courses intended for aspiring professionals who wanted to take their career to the next level and move up the corporate ladder. It wasn't a very uncommon idea, but it is unusual when you think about it. Career training usually centers around learning some sort of applicable skill, but Executive Success Programs claim to teach you how to succeed in your career by shaping the way you act towards other people and your own personal habits. The concept may have been dressed as a high-end professional training program, but in reality, [music] it was just another subset of the self-help industry, which was experiencing a massive boom around the turn of the millennium.
Self-help gurus present themselves as successful people who are merely being kind enough to let you in on in the supposed secrets that can make your life similar to theirs. The tiny things you can start doing today to give you more confidence, more money, more women, and more respect, which in turn translates to more success in all aspects of your life, including your career. The thing is, actual successful and wealthy people don't have to resort to making money by teaching classes about self-improvement. It would have to be a work of passion. And why go to the trouble of leaving behind your already fulfilling and prosperous career to teach in a classroom full-time when you can just ghostwrite a book and be done with it? Because of this, a large proportion of these gurus end up being average people who are just pretending to be successful, which even leads to criminal convictions of fraud in many [music] cases.
You can make an argument that both Keith Raniere and Nancy Salsman were in this more fraudulent category of gurus. Before offering their classes, Keith's only work experience had been a brief stint as a computer programmer after he graduated college with a 2.26 GPA and several failed multi-level marketing schemes he had concocted. One of which landed him with a $40,000 fine from the state of New York, only $9,000 of which he could afford to pay. Nancy had been a medical nurse. Despite this, Keith in particular, who was the one in charge of things, saw himself as qualified to coach the country's top executives and teach them the secrets to success in a corporate world he himself had never actually experienced.
You might think that an idea like this would be doomed for failure, but it wasn't. Keith and NY's company managed to pull in many already very successful people, including Roger Stone and Richard Branson. If you're wondering why a billionaire would take advice from a petty criminal who had less than $10,000 to his name, it's because of the clever way Keith set this whole thing up. You see, Keith didn't just offer classes. He structured his training company almost like a secret society. By taking a class, you were in on the ground floor. But if you were willing to do some extra things, you could advance in the organization and get closer to Keith. The more you did, the closer you would get.
One thing you could immediately do to advance was to get people you know to come and take a class, which added a multi-level marketing aspect to this business and is how Keith and Nancy managed to land big names. It was all through leveraging levels of separation. LinkedIn would be a great aid in this process as it materialized students' professional social networks into a tangible and browsable format, allowing Keith to direct his pupils to target specific people who he saw as high-value potential students. Like Sarah and Claire, daughters of the Canadian billionaire Edgar Bronfman. They were introduced to the program by a family friend and instantly fell head first for Keith's charisma. They would not only bring many other high-society prospects to the organization, such as their own father, but would also end up being the company's main source of funding.
Keith would introduce himself using the name Vanguard to his students. [music] And he painted himself as both a multi-millionaire and the smartest person in the world. He may not have done well in school, but he must have known how to turn on the charm because the things he would eventually get away with were frankly insane.
In 2003, Keith would sue a man named Rick Ross for allegedly infringing on his company's copyright by publishing details of what actually went on in the classes they were teaching. Before attending the first session, students would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They weren't allowed to tell anyone outside the school anything they were experiencing within it. Ross, though, had got his hands on a training manual from a former student, and he was surprised to learn just how strange things had gotten in Keith's classroom. You see, Rick Ross is a self-proclaimed cult specialist, and in his articles on the topic, he described Keith and NY's organization as a blossoming cult.
Students had to endure intensive 12-hour school days, which were designed to keep them immersed and separated from the outside world. The things they learned were actually fairly typical of any self-help cult. They were taught various methods to question and redefine their core beliefs. On the surface, this is usually presented as a way to rid one of their negative qualities, but it almost always becomes a method for the cult leader to shape their followers in whatever way they desire.
I haven't told you the name of Keith and NY's company. That's on purpose. It was called NXIVM. Nexom. It wouldn't come out till much later, but Keith had based a name on the Roman concept of nexum, a form of debt bondage in the Roman Empire, where a debtor would post his physical body as collateral for his unpaid loans, which would result in either a life of slavery or execution if a nexum debt was defaulted on. You could argue that Keith may have been striving to set up a similar arrangement with his pupils. They would have to wear different colored sashes on their person depending on what level they had obtained in the organization. Higher-level NXIVM members had more responsibility, more respect, and most importantly, more access to Keith and his secrets.
There were many ways you could move up the ranks, not just by leveraging your personal social network. In 2006, Nancy would send her daughter Lauren out to Vancouver with a mission: charm and recruit Allison Mack, a famous Canadian actress who is most well-known for her role on Smallville, a TV show that already had one of their alumni presently enrolled in NXIVM: actress Kristen Kreuk. In another successful expansion of their ever-growing interpersonal network, Mack would agree to try taking a NXIVM class and shortly after would become a fully-fledged member of the cult.
Allison found a different way to move up the ranks, much more in line with the Roman idea of nexum. She would offer her physical body to Keith, turning the organization into a sex cult, one that would only grow more twisted as the years went on. You might think I'm being coy by saying Allison offered her physical body instead of just saying she agreed to become Keith's sexual partner, but that in reality is the best way to describe it. Within NXIVM, Keith would create a sub-organization known as DOS, which is short for Dominus Obsequious Sororum, or in English, master over slave women. This would be where Keith would finally realize the Roman idea of nexum: having complete and utter control over another human being.
Again, this club would oddly enough be structured as a pyramid scheme. Keith would recruit women within NXIVM to be his slaves, and those women could then recruit other people to act as slaves under them. 150 women would end up joining DOS, with Keith being the only male member of the club. Allison Mack and Lauren, the woman who recruited her into the organization, became the first members of DOS. They were told it was an empowering feminist club within NXIVM. To join, they would have to offer collateral over to Keith. Acceptable collateral in this case included nude photographs or videos, any secret and potentially damaging personal information, and rights to all their physical assets. Once this collateral was handed over, the feminist illusion that enshrouded DOS would be shattered and its true sinister nature would become apparent.
Members of DOS would be expected to provide unlimited free labor to Keith at any time of the day and were subject to corporal punishment if they failed to meet his expectations. Raniere would use demeaning and derogatory language towards his subordinates and would encourage everybody in the club to do the same to anyone who just happened to be ranked below them. They were forced to adhere to an extremely restrictive diet to fulfill Keith's preference towards bone-thin women. This diet was so lean that most members of DOS would stop menstruating and many would even begin experiencing hair loss.
Just like he did to get students into NXIVM in the first place, Keith would instruct existing members of DOS to target specific women he found desirable with the intention of convincing them to join the club. Again, under the guise that it was some empowering women-only group. Once a woman handed over her collateral and agreed to join the organization, they would have to undergo something called a branding ritual. This ceremony was about as deranged as they could possibly imagine. The brandee [music] would only be told beforehand that they were getting a small tattoo, but would be instructed to fully undress. The brandee [music] would then be coerced into audibly asking to be branded. And Daniel Roberts, a member of NXIVM, who happened to be a medical doctor, would use a cauterizing pen to burn Keith's initials into their skin. The entire ritual would be filmed and kept as an extra piece of collateral.
All while this was happening, NXIVM would still be operating in the real world as nothing more than a school for executives to learn how to further their careers. New members would add the course to their LinkedIn profiles, just like any other career training program, unknowingly attaching themselves to a deranged sex trafficking cult. While NXIVM may have been secretive on its own, DOS was even more so. Members wouldn't be aware just who else was roped into this nightmare within NXIVM, and they'd be instructed to only communicate with their masters and Raniere through secure digital channels like Signal and Telegram.
Despite this, word would eventually get out and Keith and other higher-ups would soon face a well-deserved downfall. In 2017, a former high-ranking member of NXIVM known as Frank Parlato Jr. would publish a long-form expose on his blog detailing all the specifics of DOS I just told you. This would trigger several high-profile criminal investigations into NXIVM. Keith would be arrested in Mexico and deported to [music] the US where he would stand trial for a litany of federal charges, including CSA, possession of CP, multiple counts of forced labor, multiple counts of trafficking, racketeering, extortion, and wire fraud. That's not everything he was charged with, but I don't want to waste your time going over every single thing. He would be placed in jail as he awaited his final sentencing. [music]
As Keith settled into life in the pen, he would oddly enough continue to operate his cult from behind bars. During COVID, when visitations were temporarily suspended, Keith would instruct his remaining female followers to dance suggestively for him outside the jail. In order, they would dutifully carry out every single day. This occurred before Keith was sentenced, which was very stupid of him to do, as it was a clear sign that he didn't hold any remorse for the horrible things he had done. And after unsuccessfully attempting to hire Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, the judges would go hard on him, slapping him with 120 years in prison.
Most high-ranking members of NXIVM would also face criminal convictions with co-founder Nancy Salsman being slapped with 42 months in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering and Claire Bronfman, one of Keith's two benefactors, facing 81 months in prison for identity fraud and conspiring to conceal and harbor an illegal immigrant. Today, Keith and his cohorts remain behind bars. But sometime before their trials, they would wipe the internet of any and all possibly incriminating information. They would take down their website and they'd also torch their LinkedIn profiles, leaving only faceless husks behind. They deleted the company entirely off the platform with any link to it still remaining, leading to a 404 page. These dead profiles are a grim reminder of how one man was able to harness the corporate fanaticism that you so commonly see nowadays on LinkedIn and twist it into a deranged devotion to himself at the cost of his victim's freedoms, health, and overall [music] well-being.
Keith and NY's LinkedIn profiles are not the only empty shells of accounts that exist on the platform. You might remember at the beginning of the video when I said that LinkedIn had one of the worst cyber crime problems I've seen on any platform. Due to its unique nature as a social media website, LinkedIn is a prime hunting ground for online criminal operations of all kinds. From scams targeting individuals to full-on corporate espionage. If you're involved in the world of cyber security at all, you'll definitely be intimately familiar with the problems that LinkedIn poses.
It's late. You're getting ready to go to bed, but before you do, you decide to check your Gmail inbox one last time. It appears you have several unread emails from LinkedIn. Not unusual considering the immense amount of spam they're famous for sending, but among the junk is a legitimate notification. The woman named Keenan Ramsay has added you as a connection, and she's included a message as well.
>> Quick question. Have you ever considered or looked into a unified approach to message, video, and phone on any device anywhere? >>
The message seems like spam, but you decide to take a look at Keenan's profile anyways. It seems normal enough, but something isn't right. It's the profile picture. You look at it for a few seconds trying to figure out what about it is bothering you. And then you see it. The photo is perfect. Too perfect. She's flawlessly aligned in the center of the frame. But despite that, she's missing an earring on her left ear. A detail that likely wouldn't make it into a real LinkedIn profile picture. Keenan is probably not who she says she is.
This is an actual fake profile detected through an investigation run by Stanford's Internet Observatory. The researchers decided to look through Keenan's reported education and work history, and they actually contacted these establishments to see if they could verify that she was associated with them. None of them had ever heard of a Keenan Ramsay. This profile wasn't the only one they caught. Through their investigation, they found thousands of fake accounts using very similar looking AI generated profile pictures. These particular accounts are part of a bot network run by a shady marketing company to promote real products, but they're just a small part of a massive problem LinkedIn is facing.
Bot and scam accounts are an issue on any social media platform, but the unique nature of LinkedIn makes it the most vulnerable social network to cyber crime. For one thing, the entire platform is built around sharing information about companies, which makes it the best place on the internet to do corporate espionage and information gathering for hacking purposes. If you ever take a cyber security course, one common thing they instruct you to do is to make a burner LinkedIn account to find unintentionally exposed information on the platform when doing security research on a particular company. This can be in the form of looking at the backgrounds of photos taken in someone's workplace and seeing what was accidentally left in the picture, whether it was someone's badge number or information exposed through the windows left open on a computer screen.
LinkedIn also differs from other platforms in the sense that is built around cold calling. Getting a message from a stranger on Instagram or Twitter usually results in that conversation being placed in some sort of spam folder. But on LinkedIn, the whole point of the platform is to message strangers. That's how you get a job. But that's also how you target people for cyber crime. Having a LinkedIn profile filled with information also lends you more credibility than having a normal profile on any other social media platform purely due to the corporate and professional atmosphere of the website. On top of that, it's an acceptable practice to send strangers files to open on their computer through LinkedIn, whether that's a PDF with a resume or a word document with a job application. All of this creates a sort of perfect storm for cyber crime. And it's no wonder when LinkedIn is locked in a constant battle against an onslaught of fake profiles.
Just between January and June of 2025, the platform had banned almost 84 million fake accounts, all of which were created within that 6-month time span. These accounts are used to target both corporations and individuals, ranging from large-scale cyber attacks that result in massive data breaches you read about in the news to small-scale scams that attempt to steal personal identities. These profiles are created to resemble real people as much as possible, but they only succeed at that on a surface glance. Look any closer and you'll see just how dead they really are. There are never any activity updates, just a static, dormant profile that hasn't changed at all since its initial creation.
LinkedIn is such a perfect breeding ground for this that it even has a massive problem with state-sponsored hacking operations. Rogue nations like Iran or North Korea create fake profiles acting as recruiters to send malware to unsuspecting employees of large Western tech and media companies with the intention of stealing intellectual property, money, and just sowing chaos in general.
Back in 2024, one user received a connection request from a profile under the name Ander Kayabasi. Despite being a premium LinkedIn member, his account details seemed a little suspicious with everything having been created within the last 3 months. He claims to be a recruiter searching for web developers who specialize in crypto. The user still went forward with a connection though and they were soon offered an interview. During the video call, the candidate was asked to do a coding assessment, [music] being instructed to run and download an incomplete application that they would need to work on during the interview. The user wanted to run the app in a virtual machine, but the interviewer kept insisting that he run it directly on his computer, but couldn't really offer a good reason why it needed to be ran that way. The user luckily did only run it in his virtual environment, though, and he watched the application begin parsing through and then sending all available personal information to some server, at which point the user obviously ended the interview. This person had unknowingly connected with a state-sponsored North Korean hacker and had downloaded a sophisticated piece of malware developed in the DPRK. It's part of a major cyber crime operation called "Contagious Interview," just one of many North Korean hacking campaigns currently being operated. So the next time you get a spam cold call from a suspicious-looking recruiter on LinkedIn, there's actually a decent chance it's connected to a state-sponsored North Korean cyber crime operation.
As somebody who just quit their job last month, this video was definitely cathartic to make. I never liked LinkedIn at all when I had to use it, but I actually did enjoy covering in this video. It's definitely a weird and unique place on the internet. One that's a lot more interesting to look at from the outside rather than the inside. Guys, thank you so much for watching. If you made it this far into the video, maybe consider subscribing so you'll get more videos like this one showing up on your YouTube homepage. I've also been trying to be more active on Twitter recently, so consider following me there as well. And lastly, have a good night. >> [music] [music]