Scammers are making our Upwork journey impossible!

[khalil2015]

Hello there, 

I just need to understand what is going on with Upwork. There are so many postings that ask us to contact managers through telegram. I am getting sick of this. Is there any solution soon? 

Thanks

Khalil

[yofazza]

Hello,

It's a current event! Just read this forum a little bit more.

A quick fix is to read the job posts with non verified payment clients removed:

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?sort=recency&payment_verified=1

Although scammers can have their payment verified too, so stay careful.

There's also a chance that an experienced freelancer fall into the tricks, when the scammer put up some normal jobs with normal pay just to get you to work so it'll be visible in their history, before they do the actual scam. Your work will be meaningless because the client will be gone and any payment reversed.

[pgiambalvo]

Many people are sick of it. Upwork is aware of it and says they are working on it but has given no timeline on when so many of the Telegram scams will stop appearing on our feeds.

[tarrier-design]

Yes, getting ridiculous. Just now in grpahic design, 14 our of 20 jobs were scams. Mostly the same 2, over and over again. 

14 our of 20... I kid you not. 

It is WAY to simple for 'Upwork' to put in an algorythm that stops jobs that list an email, a phone number, the word(s) whatapp, telegram etc. I repeat... WAY TO EASY!  They can hire someone on Upwork here and probably have the code done in 12 hours or less. 

But I suspect they do not as they list/report the number of jobs in shareholder meetings and reports etc. The more jobs they say they have, it impacts share price and most probably the perfomce bonuses and reumeration for people at the top. 

[tarrier-design]

14 OUT OF THE FIRST 20 jobs I meant to say... 😲

[yofazza]

Not sure about the stakeholder part but filters are easy to workaround. They have some filters in place, because some of the scam posts are now using non-standard letters, most likely to work around a filter.

Scammers can have bots to automate (semi-automate) Gmail account creation so filters created by Upwork, or Upwork freelancers, should not be a problem. 😁

I believe we need to cut the food source.