I don’t want Upwork vetting clients any more than they already do. Three reasons:
1) It adds friction: anything UW does to make it harder for clients to post jobs means fewer legitimate jobs will be posted.
2) It’s intractable: They can never do enough vetting to eliminate scammers.
3) It’s expensive: UW doing more work to vet clients means they’ll likely need to raise the fees they charge freelancers, which means we need to raise the fees we charge clients, which will price out more clients.
To me, that second point is key. Some people might say that whatever they can do is good, even if it’s not everything. But If people think UW is vetting clients, they will assume anyone posting is legit. And that will never be true.
The responsibility to avoid scams has to be on the freelancer. Upwork has made it trivially easy to avoid the vast majority of the scams. If freelancers follow their rules and use contracts as they are designed, 99% of the scams go away.
1) don’t communicate off the platform before the contract
2) don’t exchange money outside the platform
3) don’t work without a valid Upwork contract
That takes care of the vast majority of scams right there. Commonsense, a bit of care, and awareness of red flags take care of almost all the rest. What remains for the most part are the people that do things like chargebacks or bullying on low-pay contracts.
Where Upwork has failed is in getting this information in front of freelancers BEFORE they start applying willy-nilly to jobs.
None of these scams are unique to Upwork or any of the other platforms. Almost all of them existed in some form or another long before Upwork did. What’s different is the large pool of freelancers who don’t know any better because 1) they haven’t taken the time to do basic research before they dive in and 2) Upwork hasn’t made the effort to get information about scams in front of them effectively before they get burned.
And again, the payment verification flag says absolutely nothing about whether the client is legit or not. Frankly, Upwork should just pull it from the job listings. It’s meaningless until it’s time for the offer, and seeing “payment verified” just gives some freelancers a false sense of security.
Freelancing platforms will never be a safe space. Freelancing outside the platforms will never be a safe space. It will always require the freelancers, no one else, to take responsibility for keeping themselves safe.
