Teamview - New 2020 Potential Scam Notice

esmo_developer · ‎08-19-2020

I'm aware this act in and of itself is a violation according to this previous UpWork Community Post that I found a moment ago so I wanted to make the community aware.

I was contacted via text message on Sunday from a person who indicated they got my phone number via Upwork and asked if they could discuss a potential project with me. I questioned the message because I thought UpWork doesn't send out contact info between clients/freelancers if they've never connected - and I did not have any messages or notifications in my Upwork account.

So I asked them to set up time later in the week to go over the scope of project. Well today I started asking for details on their project but they responded without answering any of my questions and instead began telling me about their Special Proposal and would like to use my UpWork account for getting work because they are overseas (Laos).

He continued to tell me that he was previously working with another UpWork member whose account is no longer active and when I asked if he could share or knew what happened to this persons account as I wondered if this was turnig out to be a scam, he did not answer me. Instead, he sent me a text of the profile and a screenshot of three projects he had recently worked on via the now inactive profile.

They ignored my questions to learn more about this 'Project' and then wanted to know how many computers I have access to. They asked if I could download Teamview on said computer so they could work remotely, and when I declined to respond to that question they offerd to send me money via Paypal to purchase a new laptop for this supposed collaboration.

At that point they asked me for my Paypal information and because I got Zero info from them I ended the call. The phone number was based in the US, area code (213).

BojanS · ‎08-19-2020

Hi Esteban,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Could you please click on my name and send me a PM with more information about this report so that I can escalate it to the correct team for further investigation?

~ Bojan