← Prathamesh Jadhav

Post-mortem · 10 min read · October 2026

Greed cost me my LinkedIn account

I built a job-lead scraper that turned 428 LinkedIn leads into 75 applications in five days. Then I changed one number from 250 to 500. Here's how it worked, how well it worked, and how it got the account locked for good.

1.The machine

I'm job hunting, and I automate anything I do more than twice. Most of my pipeline reads job boards that publish their listings on purpose. The LinkedIn part was different: it drove a real browser, signed in to a second account, through a Chrome extension I wrote. Follow one lead through it:

Every page load spent from a rolling budget, and a circuit breaker stopped everything at the first login wall. Simplified:

# per 15 minutes, per hour, per day
LIMITS = {"search": (3, 6, 12), "detail": (6, 12, 24)}

def can_open(kind, log, now):
    per_15, per_hour, per_day = LIMITS[kind]
    return (log.count(kind, since=now - 15 * MIN) < per_15
        and log.count(kind, since=now - HOUR) < per_hour
        and log.count(kind, since=now - DAY) < per_day)

if page.looks_like_checkpoint():
    breaker.trip("login_or_challenge")   # nothing runs until a human says so

Spot the bug I didn't. In my budget, one search counted as one. In the browser, one search paged through results 25 cards at a time and clicked the cards, and every click is a new URL. My budget counted what I meant. LinkedIn counted what the browser did.

2.And it was really good

Here is the whole funnel, from page loads to people writing back. Tap a bar:

A few things it did better than me scrolling at 1 a.m.:

• Where to apply. It found the apply route for 88% of jobs: 144 Easy Apply, 178 on the company's own site (with the real link to its job board), 42 unknown.
• Hiring posts, not just jobs. It searched posts too and pulled out 14 public "send your resume to" addresses. The good ones became email drafts in my Gmail with my resume attached, and I pressed Send myself.
• Most of my week. 75 of the 113 applications I sent from 11 to 15 October came from it. That's two in three.

One honest catch: my hard rules auto-passed only 4 of the 225 jobs it read in full, because LinkedIn labels most roles just "India", with no word on remote. So every lead went through a second pass where my AI agent read the description for remote work, years and stack, and I made the call. 75 went in, 75 were ruled out (58 not a fit, 12 wrong place, 5 already applied), 6 had closed, and 24 are still waiting on me.

3.Then I got greedy

It worked, so I wanted more of it. Every page my second account's browser loaded, per day, and what I changed. Tap a day:

The last change was mine, word for word, to my agent: "its okay I override the limit to 500". Every one of those limits was my number. LinkedIn never agreed to any of them.

The last morning

On the 15th I asked my agent to validate the 200-odd leads I had saved, one per minute. It helpfully mixed in fresh searches as well. Between 12:00 and 12:50 the searches clicked through 240 result pages:

I asked, roughly, "I asked for validation of the current leads, right?", and the searches came out. Then the 500 limit went in, and the loop went back to one job page every 90 seconds. Steady as a metronome:

• 14:21:53A Security Verification page. The breaker trips and the pipeline stops itself.
• 15:19I solve the check. LinkedIn shows one word: Restriction.
• 15:46 to 16:41Six more sign-in attempts. Six more Restrictions.

4.Account #2 lived for 3 minutes 30 seconds

So I made a fresh account in a fresh Chrome profile. Nothing automated touched it: the extension wasn't even installed there.

LinkedIn doesn't publish how it links accounts, but from its side the two looked like one person on one machine (values made up, matches real):

LinkedIn allows one account per person. A second one made minutes after the first got restricted looks exactly like what it was.

5.The appeal

Unlocking an account means proving who you are through Persona, LinkedIn's identity-verification partner. It never accepted any of my Indian IDs, and LinkedIn's help page says why: "Our verification system does not currently support the country that issued your identification document." India's DigiLocker option exists, but only for the profile badge in the mobile app.

I appealed, then wrote to support through the Help Center form. My inbox has the rest (IST):

Seventeen minutes from "please verify your ID" to "will remain restricted". Fair enough. LinkedIn's User Agreement forbids scraping and automated access, and allows one account per person. I broke both, and the rules won.

6.What I'd do differently

• Quit while it's working. 75 applications and 4 replies in three days was already great. The extra 250 page reads a day bought me nothing but a ban.
• A limit I set is a wish. A limit the platform sets is a fact. Raising my cap changed nothing on LinkedIn's side.
• Count what the browser does, not what you meant. One "search" was dozens of page loads.
• Never "just one more account". It gets linked to the first one.
• Read from sources that want to be read. Public job-board APIs, the public boards of Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, and RSS. That's what my pipeline uses now.
• Keep the real account boring. My main LinkedIn is for applying and talking to people. Nothing automated touches it.

0 of 6 learned.

The pipeline is fine, and I still send every application myself. LinkedIn and I are on a break. It told me so in writing, twice.