Re: Report a User

55cb0c6e · ‎04-07-2020

HI I believe I've been scammed by someone on your site. I was instructed by an Upwork member, too interview via google hangout . The User seems to have been blocked from your site, because I wasn't allowed to messaged her back via upwork. Interested in the opportunity, my only option was to participate in the google hangout. I stupidly did the google hangout interview, and the whole thing seemed questionable. I wish upwork had given more information on why I wasn't able to contact the client. Also the proposal was removed so I had no context. If I'm right and it was a scam I should have been given some warning by upwork. Or never received the message in the first place. Now I just want to know how to protect my information, and understand why the user was not able to receive my messages.

colettelewis · ‎04-07-2020

kaitlin w wrote:
HI I believe I've been scammed by someone on your site. I was instructed by an Upwork member, too interview via google hangout . The User seems to have been blocked from your site, because I wasn't allowed to messaged her back via upwork. Interested in the opportunity, my only option was to participate in the google hangout. I stupidly did the google hangout interview, and the whole thing seemed questionable. I wish upwork had given more information on why I wasn't able to contact the client. Also the proposal was removed so I had no context. If I'm right and it was a scam I should have been given some warning by upwork. Or never received the message in the first place. Now I just want to know how to protect my information, and understand why the user was not able to receive my messages.

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Google hangouts is to be avoided by newcomers. It is invariably a scam. However, your clue was that Upwork prevented you from messaging this person from messages. So you should not have gone ahead with the interview.

Upwork does its best to take these scam accounts down, but we freelancers also have to take responsibility for ourselves. If you had read the help pages for beginners first, you may have avoided almost falling for this particular scam, which is one of the oldest in the book. It used to be Yahoo, now it is Google Hangouts, and I believe other similar sites are used. There are thousands of people using exactly this MO so it almost impossible to close them down entirely.

You can congratulate yourself for dodging a bullet. Other people haven't been so lucky.

BojanS · ‎04-07-2020

Hi Kaitlin,

I've checked and it looks like the job has already been taken down because it was in violation of Upwork TOS and action has been taken on the client account.

Please, check this help article for more information on how to use the flag option found on each job post or message to report any suspicious or inappropriate content. Also, check out this post for more tips on how to avoid questionable jobs.

Thank you!

~ Bojan