Kind of reminds me of the Yes Men and their WTO web site. When some comedian/activists picked up an old WTO domain name and setup a spoof site for fun, they started getting real inquiries to the WTO such conference invitations. Their presentation on the economic efficiency of remote workers was ... interesting.
"Landing jobs at cryptocurrency firms" doesn't make a whole lot more sense than my first guess (another stupid TikTok trend). Are crypto firms really looking for Fortune 500 types at all? Seems more likely to be an attempt to intercept some sort of inside information via the impersonators. Like phishing, to which it's related, this would be low yield but even lower effort (and zero cost).
LinkedIn is horrible at detecting and handling these fake profiles. I found an obvious fake profile which was using my profile photo and a colleague’s profile text but LinkedIn’s “investigation” took two weeks to address that. Meanwhile that fake profile was freely operating.
I found that fake accidentally as that profile visited me lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men