Q: I posted a job and now getting emails and calls from outside UPwork.

[dalancer]

Q:

I posted a job and now getting emails and calls from outside UPwork. I don't like this . My privacy has been violated, and I cannot contact support by phone or email. Very distressing. I posted that I only wanted freelancers within UPwork.

[prestonhunter]

Darlene:

I am very sorry to hear about this.

This type of behavior is completely inappropriate on the the part of anybody who is contacting you outside of the established Upwork system and its proposal protocols.

Note that Upwork does NOT provide any contact information in conjunction with a client's job posts.

What appears to have happened is that bad people - who may not even be Upwork freelancers - have figured out a way to contact you by looking at information in your job post.

That is not okay for them to do. But for future reference, a "best practice" for job postings is to make sure no such information is within a job post. You can even edit your current job post to remove anything like that, and continue to have that job post active.

If you send a private message to a Forum Moderator, you can provide additional information about the people who contacted you. If Upwork can identify them as freelancers on this site, then Upwork can take punitive measures, such as removing them from the platform.

[mtngigi]

---

Darlene L wrote:

Q:

I posted a job and now getting emails and calls from outside UPwork. I don't like this . My privacy has been violated, and I cannot contact support by phone or email. Very distressing. I posted that I only wanted freelancers within UPwork.

---

Darlene,

I'm flagging your post to get a forum mod's attention.

More than likely, they are Upwork freelancers. Unfortunately, many are unproffesional and will do this if you put any identifying info in your RFP. They should be reported to Upwork.

[BojanS · Accepted solution]

Hi Darlene,

I'm sorry you've received unsolicited contacts. On Upwork, other users can't see your name on your job posting. They can only see the information that you included in the job description, title and questions as well as your location, hire rate as a client on Upwork and some other stats. Only after you connect with a freelancer by accepting their proposal or by them accepting your invite, they'll be able to see your name. 

Looks like you included few links in your job posting. Please see this help article to know how you can edit a job or make it private if you want to. 

You're free to flag or report the users reaching out to you by the flag option you can find on each profile.

Also, feel free to share your report with me via a PM and I'll escalate it to the correct team for further investigation and appropriate actions will be taken according to our internal processes.

Thank you!

[robin-luminous]

---

Bojan S wrote:

Hi Darlene,

I'm sorry you've received unsolicited contacts. On Upwork, other users can't see your name on your job posting. They can only see the information that you included in the job description, title and questions as well as your location, hire rate as a client on Upwork and some other stats. Only after you connect with a freelancer by accepting their proposal or by them accepting your invite, they'll be able to see your name. 

Looks like you included few links in your job posting. Please see this help article to know how you can edit a job or make it private if you want to. 

You're free to flag or report the users reaching out to you by the flag option you can find on each profile.

Also, feel free to share your report with me via a PM and I'll escalate it to the correct team for further investigation and appropriate actions will be taken according to our internal processes.

Thank you!

---

I am recieveing sales emails myself, without having disclosed any information about the specific project, websites, my name. How do they sniff out my email adresses and send me unsolicitated sales emails?

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Robin,

I`m sorry about the inconvenience this had caused you. Could you please reach out to me via PM (click on my name) with more details about your job posting and an example of the emails you`ve received? Thank you.

[4897daf0]

I'm experiencing the same issue. People are contacting me via email and on LinkedIn and now some of my coworkers are also getting contacted. 

[prestonhunter]

re: "I'm experiencing the same issue. People are contacting me via email and on LinkedIn and now some of my coworkers are also getting contacted."

100% inappropriate.

Any freelancer contacting you, your business, or your co-workers directly like that is violating Upwork ToS and could be suspended or terminated for doing this.

You are welcome to tell them that you are reporting them to Upwork so that their account can be terminated.
Or you are welcome to simply delete their messages without replying to them at all.

You may indeed report these to Upwork.
But you are NOT obligated to do so.

You should put yourself and your project first.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE:
Upwork doesn't provide your contact information to freelancers. So you should carefully examine your job posting and try to find what it is that allowed freelancers to figure out your company name or contact information. Remove that now from the job posting. In the future, don't include information in a job posting which would allow a rule-breaking freelancer to contact you directly.