I can see how this may confuse people who aren't tech savvy, but as a tech person, I immediately recognise this as a ghost profile. When you see five or six of these amongst the actual profiles, and all of them just so happen to be people from your email, possibly who you haven't spoken to in years, you can put 1 and 1 together and know it's a trick.
Wouldn't it cause the same distress if the deceased person really had had a LinkedIn account? Seems to me that the distress is not caused by the tactics in and of themselves.
