Spamalot

[xrmsquared]

Allow me to violate Upwork's OTT community guidelines in order to highlight an ongoing violation of Upwork's Ts & Cs by a multi-account creating, continuously-spamming non-client.

(Just some of the duplicates created in the last 24 hours shown.)

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

Spam! Oodles of it! Fake accounts, obviously so easy to create.

Remarkable that Upwork cannot create algorithms to spot exact duplicate job posts and automatically take them down!

And automatically ban-hammer the client's multitude of fake accounts!

Apparently you can just walk right into Upwork and do as you please as a 'client'... on however many accounts you wish (including the damaging review by an account Upwork Support acknowledges as fake, which still stands on my profile) 🙄😤

[spectralua]

Simiar fakes reported here. It is going within 3 weeks already and noone will care about. I see no way how to stop that.

Yep, it is easy to detect and stop. One thing: will you stop the bot if it is your bot?

[xrmsquared]

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

You removed my link & screenshots to the fake, spammy jobs (on which Upwork freelancers are pointlessly spending connects, with no right of refund – which perhaps could be described as a scam?), and yet you have left the fake, spammy job posts up on the Job Feed for more connects to be pointlessly spent.

You appear to be more interested in applying your overbearing forum guidelines (designed to save Upwork's face/blushes) and not at all interested in applying your actual platform Ts & Cs to protect freelancers from fakers, scammers & spammers.

I enclose latest screenshot (simply a screen grab of my job feed, not revealing anyone's details, not giving anyone any kind of advantage nor disadvantage, not representing giving anyone advice nor encouraging them to do anything, but simply for your own informational purposes, and thus not actually in violation of your forum guidelines).

How about removing the content (and multitude of fake accounts) of the real offender, please?

Or are you going to continue to corruptly remove from the forum anything which represents some kind of embarrassment to Upwork, whilst having no intention of dealing with the real, actual problem? (That being the only reason why there would be any actual embarrassment to Upwork in any case.)

[celgins]

I understand your frustration, but attacking **Edited for Community Guidelines** or other moderators and blaming them, is misguided.

We all see numerous fake accounts and scams across the Upwork marketplace; we've seen them for years and moderators have heard the complaints for years. **Edited for Community Guidelines**, other moderators, and community managers are responsible for managing the forums, and they do a good job of enforcing the rules and guidelines.

Scam detection, fake account removal, and fraud prevention are outside of the realm of the community forums. When notified of scams or fake accounts, a moderator or community manager will often relay messages to Upwork's Trust and Safety Team to take action. As far as I know, the moderators and community managers don't decide which jobs stay and which jobs are removed from the platform.

For years, I've seen how moderators operate in these forums, and I am 100% certain that you would have received a respectful response from **Edited for Community Guidelines** or another moderator if your post simply identified the scam, and avoided the direct criticism of a particular moderator. You may still receive a response, but the modeator's job is to enforce community guidelines--not fix every issue within the Upwork marketplace.

[xrmsquared]

My opening post, Clark, in no way attacked a moderator.

It did however contain a tongue-in-cheek, sardonic reference to Upwork's overzealous community guidelines moderation, highlighting that we are unnecessarily moderated on these forums when breaking zero of those guidelines in reporting actual abuse & misuse of the platform.

My obvious beef there being that rather than Upwork – as a whole (and it should remember that it is seen and experienced as a whole) – being so keen to remove posts that include no personal details nor break any other community guidelines, whilst being regularly seen to take no action against spammers & scammers & other mis-users of the platform, which actually does have more serious consequences.

In these instances, the emphasis & focus should obviously be on escalating these matters to the appropriate team and communicating back here that this has been done.

There would be much less frustration on these matters if there was even half the moderation of the actual platform that exists on these forums.

Only my reply mentioned **Edited for Community Guidelines**, for chopping my opening post to pieces, which breached zero community guidelines, and was posted to bring this matter to Upwork's attention.

Notice on advocating for that position, my subsequent response has not been moderated – that's because the position is correct (i.e. posting images of duplicate job listings by fake clients isn't in breach of anything, and simply removing those images & links without any feedback or response on the actual issue at hand is the real issue occuring repeatedly on these forums – not in all cases but in many).

The real issue is how phenomenally easy it is to create fake accounts on the Upwork platform – which has real consequences for freelancers.

But you post about that stuff on here, with real examples, and we are the ones who get moderated, often without response nor any indication of escalation. And the problem goes on.

As any kind of result – with Upwork as a whole entity – that sucks.  Forum Moderators clearly need more power to advocate for forum users raising very real platform issues here.

Sometimes that does happen (and I've experienced it), but on these types of issues something is clearly very amiss and I don't appreciate being moderated unnecessarily for shouting more loudly about it here – and I'm only having to do that because these 'Flag as Inappropriate' reports are themselves completely and roundly ignored.

So thanks so much for once again being so balanced in your forum postings (genuinely appreciate & respect your posts), but my findings conclude that it is not any kind of forum loveliness which is required on this issue – it's real action on scammers, spammers & fakers out there on the marketplace platform.

More moderation there!

[celgins]

Anthony W wrote: There would be much less frustration on these matters if there was even half the moderation of the actual platform that exists on these forums.

Exactly, and this is part of the point I was making. In my opinion, the moderators and community managers do a really good job in moderating these forums and enforcing community guidelines. It’s extremely difficult to post data, information, or media that violates the community guidelines. Usually, within a few hours or even minutes, a moderator or community manager will swoop in and remove violations or shut down a thread completely. And, I agree—if Upwork’s Trust and Safety team or any other designated personnel were managing the Upwork marketplace/platform with the same proficiency, the platform would see a dramatic decrease in scams, fake jobs, duplicates, and many other problems.

Also, many freelancers (not necessarily you) may not realize this: these community forums and the Upwork marketplace are two separate sites. There is single sign-on interface and API that allows us to navigate between them (not always seamlessly), so when we post messages in the community forums, the moderators often pass along our complaints and requests to the Trust and Safety team (or others) to fix, remove, or manage things over in the Upwork marketplace. Sometimes, obvious scams and duplicate jobs are removed from the marketplace after a freelancer identifies it; other times, the junk remains with no logical explanation. I blame Upwork leadership for that because the marketplace (not the community forums) could be managed 10x better than it's currently being managed.

Anthony W wrote: So thanks so much for once again being so balanced in your forum postings (genuinely appreciate & respect your posts), but my findings conclude that it is not any kind of forum loveliness which is required on this issue – it's real action on scammers, spammers & fakers out there on the marketplace platform.

No worries, and thanks.

Again, I agree--it's real action on scammers, spammers and fakers across the marketplace that needs a stronger response. Since the marketplace and these community forums are separate, all we can do is inform a moderator and/or community manager. Once they pass along our information to the Trust and Safety team, we can only hope it leads to positive action. I have no doubt that moderators and community managers report our concerns to the appropriate teams; I just don't think those teams (and leadership) are doing a great job at fixing the problems.

The good thing is, the moderators restored your original screenshot; apologized for their mistake; and escalated your concern (as expected) to the Trust and Safety team.

Now--if we could just get the Trust and Safety team leader and a few Upwork leadership personnel to make positive things happen on the marketplace side.

[426ba430]

Upwork provides the facility to mark such jobs as 'flag as inappropriate.' Just flag them and move forward. Yesterday, I found the same job with the same description in three different locations: USA, Germany, and Ireland.

[xrmsquared]

Wouldn't it be great if Upwork acted on jobs we flagged as inappropriate.

Truly, then we could just move on, and not have to post in these forums, nor battle against their ridiculous censorship of us in here whilst doing nothing about fakers and scammers out there on the platform (whilst profiting from their inaction).

All I'm doing here is trying to shine a light on this ongoing problem, and on Upwork's twisted sense of priorities over such matters.

[AndreaG · Accepted solution]

Hello Anthony,

I understand why editing out your scam report screenshot can be upsetting when it doesn't really violate the guidelines, as long as it doesn't include any identifying information. I've restored your original screenshot, and I apologize for the mistake our team made and the delay in letting you know that this has been escalated to our Trust and Safety team. I can confirm they have taken action on a number of accounts and are reviewing further so we can catch all bad actors possible.

I'd like to add that we'll continue to allow criticism and feedback about various Upwork features and processes. However, posts that come without constructive feedback or are disparaging of Upwork staff are against Community Guidelines. We are grateful for the open dialogue our community members engage in here. We want to remind everyone that the Upwork Community is a professional forum and encourage everyone to provide feedback constructively. Remember that when posting comments that specifically identify or address an individual, you refer to an actual person. We appreciate the passion, but we should all take care to use a professional, respectful approach when posting in the forums.