Someone is impersonating me on Upwork

[realjaymcgavren]

I just had this (edited) conversation via Twitter DMs:

Them: Hey Jay, this is [person], cofounder at [company]. I know one of our team members spoke with you today on the phone. Excited to work with you; please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime!

Me: Think you might have the wrong person, actually.

Them: Well that's crazy, let me check back with the team. This means someone is impersonating you on Upwork

Me: Well, *that's* worrisome. A link to this Upwork profile or any other info you have would be appreciated!

Them:  [A link to an Upwork profile with my name and picture, presumably copied from LinkedIn]  **edited for Community Guidelines**

Me: WOW. That profile was not set up by me.

Here's my LinkedIn profile description:

Author of Head First Ruby and Head First Go, both published by O'Reilly Media. 5 years of experience as a Ruby on Rails developer. Have worked extensively with Postgresql, MySQL, Rspec, JavaScript, jQuery, and Git.

They seem to have copied that to this fake Upwork profile, and added:

5 years of experience as a Ruby on Rails and Go developer. Have worked extensively with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Rspec, JavaScript, jQuery, and Git. I specialize in back-end web development, server-side real-time software development, and security and cryptography.

Links like these make me think this is a fairly common problem.

How can I report this account and get it taken down?

[petra_r · Accepted solution]

You can click on "flag as inappropriate" on the profile and choose "Person in the profile is not the person working on Upwork" as the reason for flagging. Then explain in the text field with a link to your LinkendIn profile.

[JoanneP]

Hi Jay,

I'd like to confirm that Petra is correct. You can also send me a PM with more information so I can check with the team.