Scams on Upwork

[atharmahmood71]

Hi, Upwork community,

Coming across fake projects is becoming routine. Today I placed a bid on a job that seemed like a genuine job. The client's payment method was verified and he had only posted 1 job. As the client joined Upwork a day before, i.e. 18th June 2023, he didn't hire anybody.

But when I got a reply from the job poster, I got to know that it was a fake job. I applied for the job **Edited for Community Guidelines** but the client told me it was a job for a translator.

Here's his reply:

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

Recently, Upwork has increased the limit of connects required to place a bid i.e. 16 but the overall quality of the platform is decreasing day by day. When we, freelancers, are spending more to place a bid, we expect the quality of jobs and support from the platform. I highly request  Upwork to look into this

[m_terrazas]

Flag the job and forget it.
When Upwork shuts it down for scamming, your connects will be returned to you.

[d916a771]

thanks for updating

[NikolaS]

Hi Athar,

I understand the frustration but I'd like to assure you that our Trust & Safety team is aware of the problem and is taking it seriously. They are working to address the issues, including higher than usual volumes of scam posts, constantly changing methods of scam accounts. Feel free to check this post for and update from our Trust & Safety team and their efforts around addressing these issues.

Additionally, 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. Feel free to also check this page to help you stay safe on Upwork.

[geri_kol]

Nikola,

You and your colleagues have been posting the same canned response that "our Trust & Safety team is aware of the problem and is taking it seriously. They are working to address the issues, including higher than usual volumes of scam posts, constantly changing methods of scam accounts" for more than a year now. 

You must be at least somewhat aware that this assurance doesn't sounds convincing and nobody "buys it" anymore. I understand it is a script that has been given to you and you are obliged to copy-paste it everytime someone raises the issue. However, if Upwork's "Trust & Safety team" truly needs more than a year to achieve zero progress in terms of decreasing the number of scams and spam on the platform - while Upwork keeps coming up with new ways to charge freelancers more for the same low-quality offering -  it obviously needs to be replaced with a more capable team. 

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[alessandrolupini]

Also nowadays most of the scammers even include their telegram contact or email DIRECTLY in the job post... They don't even hide it anymore. How difficult it is to implement a script where the job gets automatically removed if it contains this kind of information!?!?

[d4dbe692]

The post link provided is dated December 2022! Are there no more recent updates than that? Ouch.

[stenafio]

Can't you do something about all these fake jobs from unverified profiles from India, Pakistan, Philippines and Kenya? This is getting ridiculous...

[alessandrolupini]

I wrote about the same problem the other day. All that UpWork keep saying is that they are aware of the problem and they are working on it. I don't know what they are doing since this has been going on for easily 2 years and, if at all, the problem is getting worse by the day. Honestly, is becoming tiring and disheartening to see 0 progress.