Sea of Scammers

[#1]

My simple suggestion to stop Scammers.

In all the hundreds of scammer proposals I receive, one thing in common: contact for WhatsApp or Telegram.

My suggestion is a bot that filters all those job ads that contain this information. First that contact outside the platform violates the terms.

Once we delete all ads with WhatsApp or Telegram, we will go back to normal life.

[#2]

Some might call it an "ocean" of scammers, but "sea" works, too. And there is no possible way in the universe that I could agree with your suggestion more than I do. And despite many of us suggesting the same thing over and over again for months, Upwork won't do it.

[#3]

I would love to have some inside perspective on how UW manages their scam algos --- are they too lose, not retrained adequately?  Are the scammers moving faster than the algo can retrain?  Is this intentional?  Do they just not dedicate enough resources to the problem?  What revenue-generating logic is behind the problem?

And, to be fair, the task must be hugely difficult - a global talent community with giant scam potential.

Something is certainly broken -- I have been on UW since it was Elance and I have never read this level of scam complaint before. 

[#4]

This won't totally stop what's going on now, unfortunately, but it will help. Because about half of the scams don't even contain a WhatsApp or Telegram post these days from what I've seen. Lots of them contain links or other ways to scam. For instance, I've seen the same "Red Bull" car wrap scam post that contains neither of those things about 15 times a day and that's only in a short period of searching. All in all, I'm spending way too much time having to filter through scam posts (I'm having to report north of 20+ scams each time I search) so something overall needs to be done about how Upwork works on preventing these posts. Prior to January, this wasn't the issue it is today. So something definitely changed.