Suspect stolen codebase of one project

[c7356555]

I faced suspisious activity of freelancer.

He was only one which propose his services for specific job with PWA application and he was from Russia.

I did not link his activity to competitors.

Then, after few days of his inactivity I started to analize what he wrote and how he talked.

It looks that only access to project he wanted.

When I checked how it can happened, I found that by default upwork share your job proposal worldwide (it is available outside upwork website). So, if someone did analyze our business, he was able to pretend being a developer.

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

Any ways to legally initiate investigation and catch the person?

Any ways to force him not to use project he got access to based on Upwork rules?

[prestonhunter]

re: "Any ways to legally initiate investigation and catch the person?"

Go to the freelancer's profile, click on the "Three Dots" icon, and select the "Flag as inappropriate" option.

That is how you report the freelancer.

[prestonhunter]

re: "Any ways to force him not to use project he got access to based on Upwork rules?"

It is already against Upwork rules for a freelancer to use YOUR source code or intellectual property without your permission.

Is there a way to "force" him to not use the project?

Well... no.

Upwork has no way of physically "forcing" him to not use it.

Nobody has that ability.

[c7356555]

So, looks like I need to prepare for harm I might face.

[prestonhunter]

re: "So, looks like I need to prepare for harm I might face."

I understand that you are feeling disappointed right now.

But as a practical matter, you should think about "worst case scenarios" and think about what is realistically going to happen... and you should come to the conclusion that nothing bad is going to happen to you.

Project owners constantly allow programmers to access their source code base. All of these programmers can "steal" the code base if they want to. This does not invalid your code base or your business.

[AndreaG · Accepted solution]

Hi Alexander,

I'm sorry to hear about what happened. It looks like you were able to chat with one of our agents and they have escalated your concern to the appropriate team. Someone from our team will reach out to you as soon as possible via support ticket in order to assist you further.

Please know that in general you can choose and Change Job Post Visibility, so it is not included in search engines. Learn more about this here.

[c7356555]

Was able to contact just after I describe the issues.