What is the story?
Mona M, currently working as a product manager at Google exposed the scams and frauds committed by Shravan Tickoo, a product management influencer on LinkedIn as a 19 part series on 8th April 2022. Some parts are available as a document here.
The first look at the story sounded like a love-gone-sour-emotional-pain but a second look into the story made us realise it is much more than love gone sour.
The story started when Mona figured out Sharvan’s diabolical side.
She instantly detached herself from the person in a personal capacity. She didn’t stop there. She figured out that Sharvan was duping many women (5 as of now) in parallel using his influencer-ship/followership clout. He used LinkedIn to prey on his victims.
Once Mona figured out there are two sides to Shravan, she started digging into specifics. Boy! she found out a lot more than what she anticipated.
When she had enough facts gathered, she used it to alert the women community on LinkedIn about the issue. She openly shared all facts and figures including screenshots from personal messages for authenticity purposes.
When we dig into specifics of such stories a lot of stink comes out.
In this story the following came out:
- Shravan Tickoo committed professional fraud. He created fake profiles and accounts on LinkedIn to support, boost his posts and comments to build his personal brand.
- Tickoo claimed 103 APM offers in 93 days and it was featured in many product communities. Mona proved that many of those offer messages are fake and it was sent from the fake profiles created by Sharvan himself. She had proofs. [Shravan was quick enough to remove the fake profiles from LinkedIn the same day]
- Tickoo runs a Youtube channel called Swag Wala PM with 15K followers and a his Linkedin has about 77K followers. The entire product community respected him for his community work. Looks like all the above frauds are committed to get more students to enrol into this product management CBC. There was a business motive behind the scenes. [What he portrays online and what he is offline are two different personas. So don’t fall for it.]
- Tickoo targets high profile product women, slides into their DMs & Whatsapps and pushes them hard to do professional favours like getting high profile speakers like Marty Cagan to his cohort etc. On a personal level, he gets to know a lot of personal details about the woman (her family, background, children, issues etc). Slowly makes a romantic move and if the woman falls for it, he takes it to the next level like trips, stays and more. When things go south in the relationship, he threatens the woman with intimate pictures blackmail or self harm threats. This is his usual workflow looks like.
- When women gear up courage to speak against him, he threatens them with defamation suits, deactivation of profiles and more. [He did send those defamation emails and deactivate Mona’s profile after-all.]
In a nutshell, Tickoo has shown the diabolical side of himself. For the unempathetic out there who is asking, what is the big deal in this story? :
Surely, the story is less gruesome compared to Nirbayas of India but nonetheless traumatising for the woman who goes through the grill silently.
It is happening to folks who are supporting as well. Proof 👇
and pushing followers to report and block 👇
