Upwork doing nothing about spam

chriscarbaugh · ‎04-04-2022

In recent months my job feed has been becoming more and more filled with spam and fake job posts. I flag as many as I can, but only more appear. In recent weeks it has gone from a few spam job posts to a complete take over! My entire job feed must be well over 80-90% fake job posts, posts with scam contact info and links, and other blatant spam. It is truly unbareable and terrible that this has become so out of control on Upwork.

Worst of all, I have had an open conversation going with Upwork Support for weeks now and they provide no help what so ever. It takes them over a week to even get to the posts I flag, and by then obviously hundreds more have been added to my job feed. They have no control over what is happening and are taking zero steps to resolve it.

I've seen many freelancers making community posts about this, but I wanted to add mine too. Because if we pile on and make this a major conversation, Upwork will be forced to act and fix the platform.

What is truly most frustrating is talking with a Support agent who offers no help, no resolution, and is being condiscending towards me for complaining about it. Support needs to be better, support freelancers more, and understand issues like this are hurting Upwork tremendously.

Upwork needs to act IMMEDIATELY to fix this issue and resolve spam / scam fake job posts on the platform.

Comment and share your story to help spread awareness of this major issue ruining the platform.

00137e0a · ‎04-04-2022

There are probably more than a hundred posts about this issue, and as far I as know, everything Upwork has done so far is to reply to them with a generic "thank you, I'll follow this report to the appropriate team", while in the meantime, the scams have grown to a point where they make up the vast majority of the jobs posted on the platform.

We are completely in the dark here. We don't know if Upwork is taking any concrete measures against this issue, if they intend to, and why it has allowed it to reach such a critical level.

As many people said, this shouldn't be an overly complex thing to solve, and Upwork certainly has access to countless top-notch programmers who could do it.

sako001 · ‎04-04-2022

Toally agree with the above comments. If nothing is done about it, Upwork will start losing its credibilty as a reliable, honest and quality platform to get jobs.

So far, to me, Upwork has been great, but this spam and scam posts are taking over and destroying the brand that Upwork has built over the years.

cleodivi · ‎04-04-2022

I don't understand why it is so difficult for Upwork to implement a filter to block posts with the words Telegram, Whatsapp, etc.... 95% of translation jobs are spam!

melaniekhenson · ‎04-04-2022

I think the problem with putting in filters is that scammers will simply find another way. They'll put a space between the letters of the word, or start using different phrases...etc.

It would be a neverending revamping of what to filter out and I'm sure that would take time and paying someone, a lot of someones. That would quite possibly reflect in our fees or some other way we wouldn't like.

I'm not siding with Upwork on this, I do think there could be ways to try to filter out scams better, but as the poster above me said, there are so many threads about this already, so it's evident that if/when Upwork wants to do something, they will, and until then, complaining won't change things.

00137e0a · ‎04-04-2022

This is not a new issue, Melanie, and many businesses have implemented viable solutions to address it. Online classifieds, for example, would have gone extinct if they hadn't discovered ways to combat scams and spams like these many, many years ago.

There are numerous other instances where online businesses can't allow people to share contact information. This problem has been addressed a thousand times before.

This is what makes this situation so intriguing. It's hard to believe that Upwork couldn't do anything to stop it, if they wanted to.

melaniekhenson · ‎04-04-2022

Rafael M wrote:
This is not a new problem at all, Melanie, and many companies have implemented viable solutions to fix it. Online classifieds, for instance, would've gone extinct if they haven't found solutions to fight scams and spams like these many, many years ago.

Classifieds have spam all the time. I do know it's not new here on UW either. But there is no legitimate reason I can think of other than the standard Big Two - time, or money - not to implement these features.

pgiambalvo · ‎04-04-2022

Then at least make them find other ways.