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00137e0a
Community Member

Elaborate Scams

Hi everyone,

 

I've noticed that those obvious whatsapp/gmail/scams are no longer populating my job feed, so I'd like to thank Upwork for finally listening to users and addressing the issue.

 

However, I've also noticed an increase in more elaborate scams, and it was only natural for scammers to try to adapt.

 

These scams appear to be ordinary, coherent job postings, and in fact, they look even more detailed than the average job post, except that after you send your proposal, they will reply asking you to contact them by telegram. 

 

I suspect scammers are copying/pasting these jobs from other platforms because they are written in good English, and we all know scammers are too lazy for that.

 

Unfortunately, I believe these are even worse than those blatantly obvious scams because you can spend several minutes writing a good proposal, for nothing. Depending on how carefully you elaborate your proposals, and how many proposals you send, you could easily lose a few hours a month, in vain, replying to those. It's very frustrating

 

For now, I'll simply stop biding to "payment unverified" posts, which could indeed make me skip a few potential good clients, but I can't see any other way.

 

How is Upwork supposed to fight these? Any ideas? 

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
petra_r
Community Member

That was always the danger of aggressively going after the obvious scams in the hob feed.

The scammers don't (and won't) go away. They just adapt their behaviour.


It's basically an arms race between Upwork and the scammers.

feed_my_eyes
Community Member


Rafael M wrote:

Unfortunately, I believe these are even worse than those blatantly obvious scams because you can spend several minutes writing a good proposal, for nothing. Depending on how carefully you elaborate your proposals, and how many proposals you send, you could easily lose a few hours a month, in vain, replying to those. 


Yes, it's a case of being careful what you wish for. People kept posting in the forum saying that it would be easy for Upwork to filter out obvious scams, as if that would make the scammers give up and go away. But they're clearly not going to go away as long as they can easily make thousands of dollars a day from freelancers with no common sense, so all they've done is adapt to the situation. Before, the scams were easy to spot and just ignore - or filter out - but now they're not. So we're going to be stuck wasting our time applying to them for the foreseeable future. And if people are avoiding clients with unverified payment methods, the scammers will quickly adapt to that, too.

That could be the case.

 

One way to spot these scams is to keep an eye on the number of applicants and interviews. Everyone who applies will be interviewed.

 

You won't be able to see that if the job was posted recently, so it's a good idea to wait a few hours before responding to a potentially interesting "payment unverified" job post to check the number of interviews.

 

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