At this point, I'm wondering if maybe this shouldn't be considered criminal. Maybe this isn't the strict definition of bait and switch, but that seems to be primarily what is happening: you, the freelancer, pay money to apply to potential positions, and spend valuable time presenting yourself as an attractive option to potential clients...who largely do not exist.
Before anyone says anything like "you gotta kiss a lot of frogs" or anything along those lines, please save it. In two plus years, I've had possibly 1 legitimate job interview from Upwork, who I never heard back from after I asked for a clarification of what were vague requirements (one of those "get any score from any sports contest" jobs). Everybody else, it's what OP is describing, a bunch of scam attempts offering jobs in exchange for Telegram, WhatsApp, real phone numbers, etc.
May I offer a suggestion? The reason this spamming is allowed to continue, is because potential employers have zero skin in the game. The fact that fake account after fake account can be made and banned for clearly violating TOS, is proof that whatever measures Upwork is taking against scammers, is costing said scammers less than they're making from continuing the scam. You want to stop the scammers: make it clear that if you claim to be employing through Upwork, and you post a job through Upwork, and you do not actually employ someone through Upwork, you will pay through the nose. I bet auto spam would stop immediately if the following were done:
1) If you want to post a job through Upwork, even if that job is so much as changing one character in a simple text file, you put money down into escrow, something like $50 USD.
2) If you hire someone, the escrow money goes towards the payment, and you get the balance, if any, back. If you don't, you get the escrow money back, provided your job hasn't been marked as a scam by a certain percentage of people, and your post/hire rate is above a certain percentage (like 90).
3) If your job gets marked as a scam by enough people, or your post/hire rate falls below a certain threshold, you lose your escrow.
If they do this, the scamming will stop tomorrow. Someone wants to post 100 scambait jobs? Fine, they should be prepared to lose $5000 USD to post them.
To anyone who is up in arms about this suggestion, I have the following responses:
1) This is draconian, and will scare away potential employers.
No it isn't. It's actually less draconian than what freelancers are constantly being asked to do, which is to put up more and more money, and spend more and more time, and jump through more and more hoops, to prove that they want to work, in the hopes that they will make it back on some mythical hire that never happens. If you are a real employer, then this isn't a problem for you, you will never lose the money anyway, it will simply go towards paying the real freelancer you have hired through Upwork for your real job.
2) Many employers don't hire because they can't find people to satisfy their requirements. This would penalize them unfairly.
I understand that everyone here believes their project to be special and have unique requirements, but let's be honest and blunt: most of the projects here, even the real ones, are solved problems. You have 500 files that are a mess, and you want the data in them assembled a certain way in fewer files; you have this web appliance over here, and you want to get it to talk to that web appliance over there; You have 12 gigs of data in this medium, and you want to put it in that medium in a format such that it can be fed to this, that, and the other device. That is all well and good to have those issues, and to want those issues solved. But once again, let's be blunt, these are solved problems, they aren't things that are on the leading edge of theoretical possibility. Most of the time, when someone says "couldn't find someone to fulfill the requirements" for these things, that's code for "couldn't find someone who thought that 5-10 dollars an hour to go through my 6000K line poorly documented function that handled everything at the company was a steal."
The suggestion I am floating ends that problem: if a potential employer is so worried that they will lose money from this that they stop willy nilly posting complex, skill intensive jobs for starvation wages, just because they can, good. We can bargain with the remaining people who have actual jobs and requirements in good faith.
3) If you're a good consultant, you should have people beating down your door/you should demonstrate the skills necessary to set yourself apart from the pack. If you did this, you wouldn't have scam posts in your inbox.
Once again, see 1 and 2, and consider how much you have to do to be considered a viable option at all on Upwork as a freelancer (Also see the several thousand posts by other people describing the cluster that is trying to build a reputation of any kind on Upwork...without actually having a reputation). I have had to generate project examples, I have had to have a career, I have had to be able to produce a body of work that suggests that I know something of from whence I speak when I say that I can address certain software and networking issues. Furthermore, I can actually produce live references that can attest to my skills and abilities. I suspect most freelancers on here can: you're required to in order to even begin to market yourself on here. As a freelancer, you have to put your face out there, you have to put your identity out there, you have to put your references out there, you have to put your reputation out there in the hopes of finding something, and then continue to pay money for the privilege of doing it. But Jim can just show up on here as an employer, with a one sentence tagline, and poorly scripted requirements, for garbage jobs, with low pay, that often aren't even real, and you know what? I have no way of knowing if that person is even real. Does Jim know anything about project management, is Jim an honest employer, does Jim have reasonable and defined expectations, is Jim willing to put skin in the game? As a Upwork employer, Jim isn't required to tell you any of that. And really, that's the core problem: potential Upwork employers can just post literally anything, with zero requirements, and "they're job creators", so no requirements will be asked of them. Meanwhile, I am sure that Upwork has plans in the works to require freelancers to sign over their firstborn for the privilege of applying for jobs in the next year.
TL;DR: I agree wholeheartedly with OP, Upwork needs to implement actual penalties for job spammers/scammers, make employers share profiles and proof of commitment with freelancers.
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