Watch Out: Scammers Are Here!

[halali]

Recently, dozens of job posts are displaying on the platform with many titles like: simple typing, document converting from pdf into many other languages, simple translation job, shot retyping job, and many more, on the first pages of freelancer’s feed pages every single day and time. And, most of them are related to clients who have no previous experience (just I job posted), client’s payment method not verified, paid nothing before, and comes from more than one location. They confused us as freelancers. I think a lot of them are scamming and fishing attempts to hunt freelancers who accept to work outside Upwork. I have witnessed some cases on the platform complaining against such posts, and some freelancers have been scammed.

I wonder why Upwork allow to such people to post these posts without payment method verified, and also allow them to repeat their posts more than once, they make huge interviews without hiring a single freelancer, and then ask them to go to telegram, email address, or other ways, and after completing the jobs, they ask freelancers to pay some kind of fees to release their payments, which may force some freelancers to pursuit their payment for the hard fake jobs they have done, and lastly to be scammed.

Despite, I know that Upwork is doing great efforts to prevent such misconducts, and it is the fault of freelancers who accept to go outside the platform. Therefore, I suggest that Upwork not to allow clients who is not verified (Identity + payment method) to post jobs.

Be Safe

[d9fc6d8d]

Yup, around 50% of my job feed consists of these nowadays.

I'm sure Upwork is happy about this and won't do anything about it since the more scam posts, the more freelancers will waste connects applying for those and the more they will need to buy more connects.

Given all the shortsighted decisions Upwork has made in the past year that focus exclusively on short-term profit, one would think that they would at least use some of that profit to implement the most basic type of quality control.

[759e32fa]

Hi Hazem and Ze Eduardo,

Many of you noted challenges that our teams are working to address, including higher than usual volumes of scam posts, constantly changing methods of scam accounts and gaps in user education around Upwork TOS and safety. I want to assure you we are working on opportunities to address these on all fronts. I encourage you to check out this post for more details. We’ll continue sharing updates and information around the team’s initiatives as they become available.

When clients post jobs in the marketplace, we encourage them to add a payment method but there are circumstances when they still have to contact their bank to allow international transactions hence you'll see that the payment method is not verified.

We are also implementing changes where clients need to pay a contract initiation fee. You can read more about this here.

[d9fc6d8d · Accepted solution]

How will the contract initiation fee solve this issue? This issue is taking place before any contract is initiated. What you do need to do is to implement some - at this point, any will do - kind of quality control before jobs get posted.