how are people able to contact me via phone and email when i didn't post them publicly?

[176ae7c6]

This is quite alarming. I did not post my personal email or personal phone number publicly however there are people from areas that i did not select calling me multiple times a day and emailig me. I am treating these as scammers but I want to know how they got my info to go outside of upwork to contact me and my company's owner, and how to fix it.

[mtngigi]

If you posted a job with a website link or information that would give clues to your business, sometimes that can make it easy to be tracked down. As well, once a freelancer submits a bid, they see your account name.

That said, this is not something professional freelancers should do and I'm sorry it's happening to you.

[176ae7c6]

Thanks all who replied - lesson learned. Usually we hire through networking or more often use our typical devs, but this project is too small to bog them down with bigger and more lucrative projects.

[lysis10]

Aint' it great? Let me guess... SEO stuff? They are a scourge. I get at least a few of their "I am seo expart Jack from india we reputable and I get ur <insert parked domain name here> to #1 in the goggles" emails a day. 

You must have some identifiable info in your job post. For SEO, I think it's better to invite people and only give your URL to people you like after getting some bids.

[csjarmitage]

Yeah.....

We had this happen and it was a nightmare for two weeks, eventually dying off.  But it was a stressful two weeks.

As stated previously, you've included something in your job post that identifies your company.  There's really no way to manage it at this point because you've been crawled and you can't unring that bell. 

I had to take it as a lesson learned.  We do not ever make our job posts public anymore, and even private invites are stripped of any identifying information.

[mtngigi]

Christy - I'm curious ... does Upwork do anything about freelancers who do that? Or does that depend on whether or not the client reports every single on of them (probably a nightmare proposition).

[csjarmitage]

The reporting process was cumbersome so we just let it slide.  I'm sure they would have handled it, but we had approximately 200 inappropriate contacts and I would have had to match their correspondence with their Upwork profile.

I started putting together a document with the profile link and a screenshot of each freelancer and then gave up. Ain't nobody got time for that!

---

@Virginia F wrote:

Christy - I'm curious ... does Upwork do anything about freelancers who do that? Or does that depend on whether or not the client reports every single on of them (probably a nightmare proposition).

---

[mtngigi]

Yeah - I can understand how that it could get to be a bit much. I wish freelancers who do that could understand how that behavior undermines Upwork's platform.

[176ae7c6]

I let the one who called 3 times this morning know that we only consider applicants via upwork when he continued to press, I repeated, and then had to hang up on him. I agree, this is unprofessional behavior and red flags them instantly in my book! Thanks again!!

[lysis10]

---

@Cassandra M wrote:

I let the one who called 3 times this morning know that we only consider applicants via upwork when he continued to press, I repeated, and then had to hang up on him. I agree, this is unprofessional behavior and red flags them instantly in my book! Thanks again!!

---

 Yeah they'll call your boss (I guess unless you are the boss lol), your boss' boss and even contact you and pretend that your boss told them that they are hired.

Word on the streets is that 95% of them are from the same 2 countries too.

[mtngigi]

Perhaps that's one you let Upwork be aware of. Three strikes and you're out!

[lysis10]

---

@Virginia F wrote:

Perhaps that's one you let Upwork be aware of. Three strikes and you're out!

---

 There are hundreds of them and not all of them are actually on Upwork if the post is public. It would take a lot of digging to figure it out and the client would have to waste a ton of time logging everything. 

If it wasn't for the connect system, I'd say upwork should post dummy jobs to catch these people but it wouldn't be fair to legit freelancers using their connects.

[prestonhunter]

It is very unfortunate that any freelancer would contact you in any way other than through proper channels: by submitting a job proposal on Upwork.

But clearly this has happened.

No excuse for it.

I guess the (unfortunate) lesson is to provide details necessary for a freelancer to know if this is a job they should apply to... but nothing that makes it easy for these terrible people to contact us directly.