Another job invitation that looks like a scam.

[abixbg]

After this client responded to my proposal I received from him PDF file which contained a link to Google Forms that I had to complete to continue with the "hiring process". It includes this question which is highly suspicious. 

Kindly provide your primary wallet address for ETH/BSC/SOL to receive your monthly (weekly, daily) salary.
This information is necessary as, in the event of your satisfactory performance, we plan to cover the UpWork fee for hiring and establish a direct contract with you. To ensure smooth processing, please include your primary address with transaction history. This helps build trust, as newly created addresses might result in potential payout delays from our payout team.

Please fill in only the wallet address.

It is hard to beleive any client will pay over 10K fee just so they can "establish a direct contract".  

Upwork is asking for "feedback" for for so many things but kindly ignoring what many freelancers say: There is absolutely zero verification of client's identity which is like flashing sign welcoming all kind of scammers.

[759e32fa]

Hi Radoslav,

Any payments outside Upwork is against ToS. We have shared all your feedback and made sure these are being look into by the relevant team. At the moment, I can see an increase in posts about scam/spam invites and the reports for scam/spam job posts have relevantly decreased.

What this tells us is scammers are changing their methods once they see that their previous methods and patterns have been recognized and are already being blocked.

We encourage you to continue staying vigilant of suspicious user activity on the platform and send us a flag whenever you encounter one so our team can review it too.

[kelly_e · Accepted solution]

If you're seeing a decrease in freelancer flags, I'd bet anything Upwork is misunderstanding the reason.

I no longer flag unless a posting is SO egregious I truly fear for other freelancers. There are two reasons I have stopped flagging in the last few months:

1. Flagging has close to zero apparent effect. Serial scammers are back with their exact same scam in minutes or days... word for word, for months on end. Why flag, if UW doesn't care to automate dealing with them so that at least I don't have to see the same ones over and over?

2. (And way more important) UW and I used to be partners in my making an income here. I felt that I was helping UW (flagging, giving you good word of mouth off site, etc.), and UW was helping me (connecting me to jobs). I was invested in your success. Since UW has allowed the site to become completely useless to my income in 2023, I discovered that I don't give a hoot about helping UW. I can't spend my time here doing free work when I don't get any paid work anymore either. Connects cost 4x what they did a few months ago, and my view rate has plummeted to close to zero... as have my new UW jobs. I'm close to paying YOU to be here, while UW keeps the fl floodgates open to make things worse for your long-time professional users by the day. So I no longer feel that warm, fuzzy sense of mutual helping.

If anyone at UW thinks fewer flags has something to do with scammers, and not with freelancers being sick of doing something for less-than-nothing, they don't understand user behavior very well.

[abixbg]

Lately, the focus seems to be on these pointless coaching webinars, and attempting to push AI everywhere because it is trendy and shareholders probably will see it as a good thing, which ironically increases the problem with scammers. Now, they can produce coherent text using GPT. Previously,  most them struggled to write even 2 sentences in English.

[1eec6762]

Yeah, I recently experienced the same thing as well. The account is called Santino Bennett and this person sent me a Google Doc survey and asked for my wallet address, which I'm not sure what it is. Luckily, I saw this post so I reported this account. 

[tomzilla1]

More and more job posts are scams these days. Either completely scams, or posts that want world-class, bestest, number 1, Google rankings, while offering $7 to $40 an hour. No wonder nobody applies to them and the job is sitting there for like 28 days with 0 activity.

[ivangsp]

I just received the same message in the Google form that was shared by the client. I have reported the message to Upwork.

[samimshaikh786]

Today I received a  PDF that has a link asking to fill up the form where the job poster is asking about wallet.

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

[egaruth]

Hi SamimBadshah,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I would like to clarify that a real client will never ask you to give them money to start working, cash a check for them, work for free, or provide your personal information. I encourage you to let us know if a TOS violation has happened by using the Flag as Inappropriate option throughout the platform. You can learn more about user reporting here.

Additionally, you may want to check this help article and this thread to help you stay safe on Upwork.