The spam and scams is out of control recently

[aquamkd]

I can't help but notice the amount of scam job posts going on recently. It is like there is no one to filter through them once they are being reported. Some are even spamming the same job description over and over trying to get people to send them emails, add them to whatsapp or telegram in an attempt to scam them or something similar. I have been on Upwork for 5 years and it has never been as worse as it is now. 
I don't really follow with the community a lot specially on news, only when new features are released for Upwork, so how does Upwork plan on dealing with these kinds of submissions? 
It's clearly getting out of control. It is ruining the experience of both freelancers and clients.
They need to do some kind of screening process to make it more difficult for scammers to keep doing it.

[yofazza]

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how does Upwork plan on dealing with

we are working on opportunities to address these on all fronts and have communication coming in a few weeks to share our Trust and Safety team's ongoing initiatives (both preventative and reactive).

That's the (kind of) official answer posted by a moderator in another thread.

In the mean time you can exclude non-payment verified client, or exclude posts that contain some keywords, with the custom search.

This one will exclude non-payment verified clients:

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?sort=recency&payment_verified=1

[aquamkd]

I know and to be honest it is not affecting my work, it's just annoying at this point. But this is only because I'm not new to the platform. I'm sure the new freelancers will be frustrated and mad to waste precious connects on jobs that will turn out to be a scam or a waste of time. 

[yofazza]

Actually they're not just frustrated and losing connects, some have lost over $1000 to the scams in the past 2 weeks.  A lot more lost just hundreds of dollars.

[pgiambalvo]

These scams have been being reported for so long that they should have been able to be prevented from being posted long ago.

[dougduart]

I've noticed this as well. It is easy to report to Upwork, I think for clients it must look weird and suspicious when they see a bunch of job posts asking for Telegram or WhatsApp contact. I am not a dev-pro, but I think this is extremely important and should be resolved ASAP, because it is annoying for everyone, and it is taking in risk on the reputation of the platform, which is extremely important for everyone.

[mmcgrath_design]

I've reported this numerous times and they don't seem to care. All I get is some generic, bot-like response about how they 'hear me' or 'we undertstand your frustration and working hard to make UpWork a safer place.' My feeds are littered with spam... absoluted riddled with it. I don't care as much any more but you'd think if this experience is the same for a large number of decent freelancers, they'd do something about it?  

[petra_r]

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Douglas U wrote:

I think for clients it must look weird and suspicious when they see a bunch of job posts asking for Telegram or WhatsApp contact.

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clients rarely, if ever, look at the job feed.

[roberty1y]

I think new clients might, just to get an idea of what's going on here. I hope I'm wrong about that. One look at the inundation of scams would send them running.

[dave_milne5]

Yeah, right now probably half the recent jobs in my feed are repeats of the same obvious scams that ask for an email contact. The least upwork should do is exclude email addresses from job postings 

[the-right-writer]

Read this quickly, as the powers that be keep removing my comments. Upwork has no intention of doing anything about the scam and/or contact jobs. This problem has been ongoing since August and has become 94% scams in January. Upwork has the talent, staff, and equipment to simple, cheaply, and easily remove 99% of the cons. After much research and studying the marketing content, I am certain this is to inflate the number of jobs artificially. Check out the stats Upwork uses for marketing. No? Then someone at Upwork needs to respond with the truth.

In the last week, the jobs run outright scams 34 - 42 jobs of 50 every day, all day long. I stopped flagging and send in screenshots of the entire job page. I have begged, pleaded, and demanded a response, private or in the community; all I receive is the canned, **Edited for Community Guidelines** - thanks for letting us know; we are working on it. If any freelancer had the scams as a project and did the job as Upwork has, they would never get paid, and if they receive feedback, it would sink their JSS into the toilet. The same is happening on the big scale for Upwork. Unfortunately, in the mad rush for $$$$$$$$, their reputation is sliding. Furthermore, their non-actions directly affect the reputation and, therefore, earning potential of every freelancer on the platform.

[pgiambalvo]

Truth.

[kate-papenberg]

I hate to ask this, but where can we find work if these bots, scams, and spam accounts keep filling our inboxes with junk?  In other words, there must be a setting that I switched that I have to toggle OFF or, else, change my filters.  Can someone please advise or else create a feature/filter/function that removes anything with a phone number from our feeds?  I'm sorry--but this is truly impacting my *only source* of income!