A sad record, upwork

[martina_plaschka]

All jobs in my job feed first page - all 10 of them - are scams. Well done, y'all. (Irony)

You need to clean up this place. This is getting completely ridiculous.  

[allpurposewriter]

That is ridiculous. Wow.

[pgiambalvo]

Just checked mine and only 7 of 10 are scams! Hooray!

[artkosdesign2]

It´s happening the same at architectural job post! Every day there are more and more

[martina_plaschka]

I'm with you! But it needs a cute twist, like girl-scammer meets boy-scammee, but they only find out at the end they are actually brother and sister. Something like that. You figure it out. 

[2e395a62]

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Martina P wrote:

 girl-scammer meets boy-scammee, but they only find out at the end they are actually brother and sister. 

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Well, in some Appalachian out-of-the-grid communities that ain't that much of an issue, though... 😉 😉 😉 

[feed_my_eyes]

At least Upwork removes the scam posts (eventually), whereas freelancers can even confess to being scammers, and continue using the platform.

[pgiambalvo]

I wish I could give you infinite kudos for this.

[etrusca]

True, in my page too the greatest part of jobs are scam.

[prestonhunter]

Yeah, this is unacceptable.

If Upwork is not going to do something on its own to stop this, it needs to let freelancers directly remove scam posts from the job feed.

Here is what should happen:

Experienced freelancers will be granted authority to remove job postings.

When a freelancer removes a job posting, the client is notified that their post has been removed, and they are provided with a button they can use to appeal.

Upwork employees will review such appeals requests. If an Upwork user is found to be removing legitimate job posts, he will lose the privilege.

Even removals that are are not appealed will be reviewed be Upwork, but users will have a trust score associated with their removal activity. If freelancer "John Smith" has removed 100 job posts, and all that have been reviewed have been found to be proper, and no appeals have been files, then his removal trust score is very high and there is less need to review individual removals.

The goal is to make review of user removals as infrequent and as unnecessary as possible, while still ensuring that real client job postings are never removed.

It will be important that freelancers participating in this program understand that the purpose of this is to remove SCAM job postings. They are not allowed to remove jobs because they don't think the pay is high enough or because they don't like people from Indiana or whatever.

I am not saying that this WILL happen.

I am saying thst this (or something like this) SHOULD happen if Upwork is not going to do something else to address the problem.

Alternately, Upwork could assign its own employees/agents to review incoming jobs and remove obvious scam jobs.

[pgiambalvo]

Sounds good to me because whatever's being done by Upwork isn't working. At all.

[jr-translation]

They could award the people with the highest score/most removed illegitimate job postings with mugs.

[colettelewis]

I think I would prefer a Tshirt with something like "I reported over 1,000,000 scams on Upwork" The Upwork logo could be reworked into a fist 👊.   

[luce-neidert]

I've been doing a lot of job flagging. I wouldn't mind getting paid for the service. No mug, no T-shirts, just plain money.

[feed_my_eyes]

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Preston H wrote:

Here is what should happen:

Experienced freelancers will be granted authority to remove job postings.

When a freelancer removes a job posting, the client is notified that their post has been removed, and they are provided with a button they can use to appeal.

---

Too many freelancers think that all unverified clients are scammers, so they'll be flagging every job post from a new client. And will clients actually bother to "appeal" when they've been flagged, or will they simply go elsewhere? 

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Preston H wrote:

Upwork employees will review such appeals requests. If an Upwork user is found to be removing legitimate job posts, he will lose the privilege.

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Upwork employees already review job posts when we flag them; the problem is that this process takes way too long. If they're reviewing appeals from clients, it could also take several days, and in the meantime, the client will be gone.

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Preston H wrote:

It will important that freelancers participating in this program understand that the purpose of this is to remove SCAM job postings. They are not allowed to remove jobs because they don't think the pay is high enough or because they don't like people from Indiana or whatever.

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If you think it would be easy to educate freelancers so that they know what a scam looks like, why can't they be educated to not fall for them, thus cutting off the scammers' food supply?

[lucioric]

That talks about the quality of the random people; dishonest, increasingly.

[mipaparazzi]

I wish Upwork can actually listen for once.

[kfarnell]

I first noticed the insane number of 'type this from images' scam listings because that was precisely what I was going to post a project for. Obviously, I had to forget that. Each time I look, the number has increased. 

Inevitably, people are going to decide it isn't worth their while posting a project that will be surrounded by all that nonsense. This is way beyond a minor inconvenience to freelancers. 

[ravi_iitian]

Recently, Upwork has been inundated with this type of posts:

"We recently got our apps translated and we are looking for someone to proofread them. Mobile phone and good language knowledge is necessary.

"Please don’t apply if you’re not from xxxxxx!"

[nhansen]

Maybe you see different types of job posts, but I do think that people here in the forum are too quick to label everything that seems a bit off as a "scam."

I think a lot of clients simply don't bother to read the rules, like about not giving contact info, but still fully intend to and do hire on Upwork. They may just prefer to use the phone, for example, to conduct an interview. Maybe they are an old person not comfortable with Zoom. Some may just cut and paste a job ad they posted elsewhere to Upwork and that's why the name of the company or contact info is in the ad. 

I understand why Upwork has the rules in place but I don't think all of those who break some of these rules actually in the end break the rule about clients not hiring and paying freelancers off of the platform.

I really think in the end, it's about intention. There's one company that has literally posted dozens of ads looking for a well-paid full-time writer and they have gotten probably hundreds of applicants. I believe they may have even invited me once. But they haven't hired any on Upwork, yet they don't seem to be violating any rules. They simply are hiring lots and lots of people to take a 90 minute $10 paid "test" as the first step in getting the full-time job. A great way to lure people into doing cheap labor. I call that a scam, yet it doesn't break any rules.

There was a job that I saw involving doing some work in person (not remotely). From the job description, the company doing the hiring 100% intended to violate the laws where they were planning to do the work, and were planing on doing something that could land the people involved in prison for years. I believe I reported it but it didn't necessarily violate any of Upwork's rules and it wasn't removed. Of course, Upwork's staff can't be familiar with all the legal ramifications of work in different jurisdictions and the work would have been perfectly legal in other locaitons, but can we call that a scam?

[moonraker]

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Nicole H wrote:

But they haven't hired any on Upwork, yet they don't seem to be violating any rules. They simply are hiring lots and lots of people to take a 90 minute $10 paid "test" as the first step in getting the full-time job. A great way to lure people into doing cheap labor. I call that a scam, yet it doesn't break any rules.

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I might have missed something here but if they are hiring 'lots and lots' of people, but not on Upwork, then how are the not breaking any rules?

[jr-translation]

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Jamie F wrote:

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Nicole H wrote:

But they haven't hired any on Upwork, yet they don't seem to be violating any rules. They simply are hiring lots and lots of people to take a 90 minute $10 paid "test" as the first step in getting the full-time job. A great way to lure people into doing cheap labor. I call that a scam, yet it doesn't break any rules.

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I might have missed something here but if they are hiring 'lots and lots' of people, but not on Upwork, then how are the not breaking any rules?

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You missed the first part. The entire point is to get as many people as possible to write a good piece while paying way less by promissing one lucky winner to get the "well paid job". But I think this is actually covered by this bulletpoint from the PROHIBITED SITE USES. Just because there is no winner in the end, does not allow clients to underpay freelancers in a test.

[elastella]

"Maybe you see different types of job posts, but I do think that people here in the forum are too quick to label everything that seems a bit off as a "scam."

Yes, you are clearly not seeing the postings all these veteran Upworkers are talking about. I just had seven in a row on the second page of my feed that is up to 70% made up of obvious scam/spam these days.

[pgiambalvo]

I would like to be able to add "Flagging" as one of my skills and get paid for it.

[nhansen]

Veteran? I've been on Upwork since 2007. Maybe it is certain categories of jobs that lend themselves more to scams. I don't generally look for fixed price jobs for example unless I get invited for one or it is something I am extremely qualified for, for example. It's probably harder to scam someone on an hourly job.

[renata101]

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Nicole H wrote:

Maybe you see different types of job posts, but I do think that people here in the forum are too quick to label everything that seems a bit off as a "scam."

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Do a search like this:
https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=t.me&sort=recency

Then look at a few things. How many of these jobs were created by clients who have never hired? How many of these ads look like they were created using a template?
When I looked at that search, I got 409 hits and I looked at the hiring histories. I saw that 409 of the posts were by clients with no hiring history.

How man common names can you find in the contact information on the posts? You might think that the similar contact details correspond with clients who do multiple posts, but then you start noticing that the same "client" appears to be posting from about 3-10 different countries. 

Is this helping you to understand what other people are seeing?

[ravi_iitian]

Around a thousand dubious RFPs here:

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=Please%20don%E2%80%99t%20apply%20if%20you%E2%80%99re%20not%...

[renata101]

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Ravindra B wrote:

Around a thousand dubious RFPs here:

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=Please%20don%E2%80%99t%20apply%20if%20you%E2%80%99re%20not%...

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Hi Ravi,

Hope you are well. That's one of the most impressive searches I've seen yet.

This is another impressive feature of your list:

[ravi_iitian]

Hey Renata,

I hope you are doing great!

[ericaandrews]

From the IT world, the absolutely WORST UW sub-category I have seen is the 'Information Security & Compliance' sub-section, which you would think would be focused on cyber security but it has become a 'black market' for shady people hiring for all manner of illegal activity just shy of taking out 'hits' on people:

"break into my girlfriend's phone"..."hack into government server xyz" ..."steal intellectual property from competitor"..."break into google and put me first in search results"..."help move money discreetly across countries"..."hack my wife's iphone to get her GPS location"..."send viruses to instagram users"

Even today, a request for assistance with committing apparent insurance fraud showed up in the list  with somebody requesting "help" to put their car under insurance (retroactively) after an accident has already happened:

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

I can't tell if these people are seriously stupid enough to solicit this stuff online or if this is some type of massive police 'sting' operation.  Either way, UW appears to be "asleep at the wheel". 

The 'Information Security & Compliance' sub-category needs to be renamed to "Federal Incarceration Opportunities"

[b013cddd]

Honestly sister! I'm facing the same problem and I think this is one of many reasons I'm not getting any work. Really disappointing and sometimes Whenever I submit proposals they never hire anyone. 

Getting Very sad and depressed day by day.

[feed_my_eyes]

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Labonnya H wrote:

Honestly sister! I'm facing the same problem and I think this is one of many reasons I'm not getting any work. Really disappointing and sometimes Whenever I submit proposals they never hire anyone. 

Getting Very sad and depressed day by day.

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Maybe the reason you're not getting work is because your JSS is poor and you have no graphic design work in your portfolio, only background removal, and that's one of the most over-subscribed categories on Upwork.

**edited for Community Guidelines**

[b013cddd]

Thanks, dear! Haven't thought about that But I have 8 pages of the portfolio in my profile and I was tope rated freelancer 1 month ago, IDK why my jss got poor! 

[martina_plaschka]

What makes you think she has no other sources of income?

[feed_my_eyes]

I'm happy to give you some advice. My strategy is to seek clients with ongoing needs, and PowerPoint is a great niche because businesses that do presentations have lots of repeat work, and most graphic designers don't know how to use it properly. Maybe one day you'll discover something that you're good at, and that can be your niche? Just a suggestion. I also find that it makes good business sense to take my clients off of Upwork at the end of the two-year disintermediation period (unless of course they prefer to continue here), so that I don't lose money on fees and exchange rates. Of course, that means that I can't impress random strangers in the forum with the total amount of sales that I've accumulated by working with the same clients over and over for years and years,  but I've learned to live with that. And, I always recommend that freelancers diversify their marketing efforts, so I advertise, network, and ask for referrals. I think it's important not to rely solely on Upwork, but since you aren't getting any work here at all, it looks like there's no danger of that happening.

[ana_cuervo]

Wow! you are right. I haven’t been here for a while because I am working full time on a project. After I read your post I went to check my feed and most of the feed are scams, not verified accounts and people asking to contact them on Telegram or WhatsApp. UpWork wasn’t like this a few months ago. What a shame.

[pgiambalvo]

It really is a shame. No one knows what Upwork changed on their end (if anything) for this to happen.

[5e6175a5]

Martina, I couldn't agree more. Sooooo many job postings are 'fakes' and I end up spending my Connects in hopes they are for real. Upwork REALLY does need to do a clean sweep and get rid of these scam artists who prey on creative talents simply looking for work. JMHO

[pgiambalvo]

It is not just your humble opinion. It is many people's outraged opinion.

[etrusca]

Today on my page only scam!