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vaskoid
Community Member

Spammers are "hiring" more spammers

WARNING !

 

Today a new spam job post started circling around Upwork. The body of the post is:

 

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

 

I'm posting the job exactly as I received it (Upwork will have to scroll through the post to remove the phone number), because they need to do some work - since they are not doing anything about the spammers.

 

From what I see on this post, now the spammers are offering other freelancers to start spamming and inviting even more people to start posting for them. Good job letting this happen Upwork!

 

I wish we are able to create a vote poll on this website.

My question to the poll would be:

 

What would happen first?

a. Upwork fixes problem with spammers

b. Upwork bankrupts.

 

Feel free to vote if you'd like.

12 REPLIES 12
martina_plaschka
Community Member

I hear you! And as we all know, posting phone numbers in the forum is a serious security issue, while job postings with phone numbers are totally ok. No harm there!

You know, scamming is hard work. You need support. You need other people to do the scamming for you, ideally. Maybe you scam them too, just out of habit. 

I'd like to expand on your questionnaire:

a. Upwork fixes problem with spammers

b. Upwork bankrupts.

c. Upwork has a devious plan driving freelancers crazy wondering why they don't do anything against the incessant scams, while it appears so incredibly easy to do something about it. For some reason, they keep mumbling "excellent, excellent" like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. The reasons for that are unknowable. 

 

 

"The reasons for that are unknowable." Self-interest. If they determined it were better for them to get rid of them than to not, they'd get rid of them.

NikolaS
Moderator
Moderator

Hi Vasko,

 

Thank you for reaching out to us. I was able to locate the job post based on your report and I forwarded the information to our team for further investigation.

 

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 an update in this post for more information about the team's efforts around addressing these issues.
~ Nikola
Upwork
vaskoid
Community Member

Dear Nikola,

 

You have no idea how much I appreciate your reply to my post.

At least you made an effort to add an extra line to the draft copy/paste "pre-recorded" message that the Upwork Moderators send to freelancers.

Few days ago I posted a similar post and one of your colleagues replied.

 

I hope it's not against "Community Guideliness" to post a screenshot of the answer I received.

In the screenshot attached you can see exactly what she answered. 

 

Also, here is the link of my previous post, in case someone deletes the screenshot

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

 

It is a simple matter to search for and find 90+% of the scams. Using (t. me OR  telegram OR whatsapp OR gmail OR message me). There are currently 5,739 jobs in the writing category that are outright contact scams, not including the "make $12,000 typing words from pictures onto paper" scams.

Hourly

Fixed-Price

Less than $100

$100 - $500

$500 - $1k

$1k - $5k

$5k+

Category: Writing

5,739 jobs found

 

If we can find these scams so very easily, why can't Upwork? It is pointless for the exhausted and frustrated freelancers to individually flag jobs. Just do a search for the scammers and take them down yourselves. If I'm missing the Upwork logic, please let me know. Why not have freelancers send you the searches if everyone is too busy or whatever?

 

By the way, the contact scam figure of 5,739 is 100 posts higher than the number yesterday of 5,639.

 

This is not only frustrating and annoying, but it also covers the more profound concern of fewer real jobs and the reputation of Upwork. Constant focus can turn into tunnel vision if not tempered with reason. The fanatic devotion to money has taken down businesses far larger than Upwork. Upwork can change this spiral easily and quickly, but they refuse. There has to be another mechanism for making money besides squeezing more and more connects out of freelancers, all while seemingly encouraging the scams.

Why have freelancers do the busywork of flagging when it's a simple matter for Upwork? Is it to make us feel like we are all working together? Is it so we don't look at the artificially inflated jobs numbers, one of those metrics affecting marketing? It doesn't matter. enough. Allowing the situation to continue may provide Upwork with some $$$$$, but in the long run, this is an obvious losing strategy for everyone.

 

nikolinjo
Community Member

Hi, all

It lasts for few weeks constantly and now is the situation even worse. 10 to 15 spam posts per day on (just) Wall for Norwegian language Wall.
I can see that *all* spam-clients haven't got a verified payment.
Can Upwork do something with Payment verificiation to stop this?
Or it will do nothing, even though - just for my behalf - I reported allready over 40 spam posts.


Nikola D wrote:

I can see that *all* spam-clients haven't got a verified payment.


Why don't you simply filter by "payment method verified"?

Sorry, but I think you'vre missed the whole point. What's the subject of this topic?

Yep. The subject is Upwork allowing this to happen, not us finding ways to not see the posts.

vaskoid
Community Member

Hi Petra,

I guess you are one of the lucky ones that doesn't recieve 10-20 job offers daily, so this topic doesn't affect you as much, and if that's the case, i'm genuinely happy for you. However, there are lots of people out there who are constantly receiving the same job offers, even after they rejected it and reported it number of times. 

On top of that, Upwork started adding these spam jobs in their "6 New Job opportunities" emails that they are sending out weekly. 

On behalf of the entire community, I sincerely thank you and appreciate your suggestion to filter jobs, but the topic of this post was not "How to filter jobs".

Hey Nikola,

It looks like you're a translator, and I think that seems to be a target specialty for a lot of the scam posts. So you have my sympathies. I make no apologies for the current situation. Upwork should develop a more comprehensive screening approach.

What Petra is talking about are the filters along the left side.

Screen Shot 2022-04-10 at 2.30.14 PM.png

Just click in the appropriate boxes to remove posts in which the client doesn't have a verified payment method. I sometimes use the one that says "no hires."

I posted some tips about how to tweak the job search to filter out some of the spam/scam posts with contact information (basically, you can do an search and add this search term to it: AND NOT (t.me OR Telegram OR wa.me OR Whatsapp OR "*@*.*") . These are bandaid solutions and they won't stop the spam invites. I wish Upwork would develop some sort of action plan for this, but at the moment, it is what it is. People are complaining about it, and Upwork claims to be working on it.  But if you need to search for new contracts, this shoud help to filter some of them.

https://community.upwork.com/t5/New-to-Upwork/Filtering-Scam-Posts-How-to-use-the-Upwork-Advanced-Se...

Hi Renata,

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm sure many people know how to filter when searching for jobs, but this is not the problem here.

It's one thing to filter when you search for jobs, it's completely different to get spammed 10-20 times per day with fake job offers. 

I'm currentliy working on 4 projects actively (total of about 12 hours per day). I'm not searching for more projects - and yet, i'm still receiving 10-20 job offers daily!

On top of that, Upwork is sending their weekly emails "6 new work opportunities", and recently they started including these spam job offers in those same emails.

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