My proposed scam detecting flow

[creativedigit]

The Chrome Extension I created opened the door for communication with the direct department responsible for stopping the scam jobs on the platform. While discussing the Chrome Extension, I proposed a flow that is relatively easy to implement and I believe it would stop the disaster (best I could describe it).

Please find below my flow for dealing with scam jobs on the platform and let me know what you think of it. If you have any remarks please let me know. I appreciate it if you let me know if I am thinking in the right direction. I have already shared this with the Upwork team.

- Everyone signs up on the platform. No email confirmation. No credit card is needed. No two-factor authentication need. Just sign up and start using the platform immediately.

- Client posts a job. If the client spent more than $100 on the platform (lifetime spending), approve the job immediately. Freelancers on Upwork will report if they find anything suspicious about the job, and Upwork will take care of it from there.

- Client posts a job. If the client has spent between $1 - $100 on the platform (lifetime), check the job title & description and perform RegEx to determine if the job contains contact information such as email or phone number. On the second level, assuming there isn't any contact information in the post title or description, perform another check against an internal dictionary that contains specific words that Upwork defines. Things like "Telegram, WhatsApp, etc..". If both checks go through, automatically approve the job and leave freelancers to report anything suspicious from there. In the case where there was a problem, put the job on hold and have someone from Upwork manually review the job and approve it.

- Client posts a job. If they haven't spent any dollar amount, put their job posting on pending and inform them that their job will go live soon. Have someone from your team manually review jobs posted by new clients one by one to ensure they comply and approve the ones that need to be approved, and block the accounts of people who post scam jobs.

[vaskoid]

I definitely agree that brand new clients posting a job offer for the first time must be manually checked. The amount of spams and scams is through the roof these days.

Honest and innocent new freelancers could very easily fall for this type of scam.

Upwork definitely needs to do something about it.

I also posted a thread regarding this issue with some screenshots, hopefully they could help some new freelancers to avoid these scam jobs.

[petra_r]

How about they simply set filters which automatically "catch" all the nonsense we are currently manually filtering out like we have been screaming at Upwork to implement for literally months now? Catch them, funnel them for manual review. Job done.

Job posts with the "bad" search terms go for manual review. Others go live straight away.

That does exactly the same as what you are suggesting, just with vastly less effort and cost and manhours.

And has been suggested ad nauseam!

You're coming rather late to the party and are trying to reinvent a wheel we we've been waving at Upwork for weeks/months. Literally.

It's not that Upwork don't know what they could do to stem the tide. They know. It's hardly rocket science.

For some peculiar reason, they don't want to do it.