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renata101
Community Member

Why Does UpWork Continue to Make it Easy for Essay Mills & Contract Cheaters?

I received an invitation to interview for a "research" job this weekend from a client in Birmingham. The post contained one of the most blatent descriptions of a course assignment I've yet seen posted on this platform, complete with a detailed marking scheme. 

When I look through the client page, it appears this particular client has hired 48 freelancers and from a quick scan, other than jobs for freelancers to set up their website, most of the rest of the jobs are for college- and university-level course assignments in computer programming, statistics and accounting. This is obvious based the descriptions themselves and on the content of files attached with the job descriptions  (a few of the course assignemnts, based on the content of the attachments, are readily traceabe to schools in Toronto with computing programs). This means the client has been able to use this site multiple times to help their clients commit academic fraud. Not only that, they're able to do this while being ridiculously blatant about what they're asking for. 

It's inconceivable to me that this particular client has not been flagged by freelancers in the past. However, in the past, I've also been able to trace a lot of similar jobs back to a freelancer who appeared to have made at least $20K doing other people's homework, or better still, farming it out to lower priced freelancers on the site. 

Although UpWork supposedly has an academic integrity policy, similar clients continue to flourish on the site. My question is this: Why does UpWork continue to support essay mills by making it easy for them to do business on the platform? 

The links below suggest this is not a small-scale problem:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-45358185
https://birminghameastside.com/investigation-the-hidden-problem-of-the-uks-essay-mill-industry/

20 REPLIES 20
VladimirG
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Renata,

 

Please note that we have a dedicated team tasked with reviewing questionable jobs and it's best to report your findings while flagging the job post, since they will be able to make a final determination after reviewing all the evidence and take appropriate steps if needed. As we advised before, we can't comment on reports of suspected ToS violations publicly. I'll check the private messages you sent me for the job post link and submit a request for review from my end as well. Thanks for flagging!

~ Vladimir
Upwork


Vladimir G wrote:

Hi Renata,

 

Please note that we have a dedicated team tasked with reviewing questionable jobs and it's best to report your findings while flagging the job post, since they will be able to make a final determination after reviewing all the evidence and take appropriate steps if needed. As we advised before, we can't comment on reports of suspected ToS violations publicly. I'll check the private messages you sent me for the job post link and submit a request for review from my end as well. Thanks for flagging!


Hi Vlad, 

Thanks for your response. I don't expect you to discuss the specifics. I just wanted to put it up for discussion. 

The problem I'm having with this particular invite is that the client history of similar jobs with similarly blatant descriptions of college and university course assignments (with assignment sheets provided) is pretty damning. If you read the Birmingham article, you'll get an idea of the types of vague descriptions companies hide behind to legitimize the services they offer. They're pretty predictable and easy to understand once you get the hang of them. And, as far as I can tell, the "dedicated team" tends to allow companies that provide similar statements to keep on using the platform to solicit writers, programmers and other professionals to do people's homework. Making it a piece of cake for them to operate contributes to academic fraud.   


This isn't a concern to me because I'm a goody two shoes. People use the types of assignments that are generated by freelancers responding to these postings to pass courses in professional degree programs. The one that worried me most was the aeronautic engineering homework, but of course there are postings for writers to produce essays for law courses and postings for accounting homework for CPA programs.

In addition, I don't think it reflects well on the professional image of the platform to support these types of companies. And whatever contributes to creating a questionable image for UpWork eventually reflects on the people who choose to maintain freelancer profiles on the platform. 

Vlad, this is yet another instance of FLs pointing out a chronic problem that hurts the platform as well as everyone who is professionally invested in it and being asked to continue reporting individual examples. The proliferation of academic fraud is so rampant and so blatant that many of us have given up trying to help UW police it. We understand there is a dedicated team in place charged with controlling this problem. Whatever they are doing is not working. Change needs to happen at that level, not through individual FLs flagging individual violations. 


Phyllis G wrote:

We understand there is a dedicated team in place charged with controlling this problem. Whatever they are doing is not working. Change needs to happen at that level, not through individual FLs flagging individual violations. 


Or they are "keeping up appearances" to keep up the income.


Phyllis G wrote:

Vlad, this is yet another instance of FLs pointing out a chronic problem that hurts the platform as well as everyone who is professionally invested in it and being asked to continue reporting individual examples. The proliferation of academic fraud is so rampant and so blatant that many of us have given up trying to help UW police it. We understand there is a dedicated team in place charged with controlling this problem. Whatever they are doing is not working. Change needs to happen at that level, not through individual FLs flagging individual violations. 



Even when we do flag individual violations, nothing happens to the clients who post them or the freelancers who accept the jobs. The individual job may be shut down if the lengthy deliberation process finally deems that the job violates policy (provided the client hasn't already hired someone to do it by then), but the "team" doesn't tend to look at the broader picture of repeated postings of jobs that violate the policy by the same client. 

What I hope will happen as a result of this is that the team examines all of the jobs the client has posted and the attachments and make some sort of determination based on multiple incidents of repeated policy violation. 

This isn't a case of one bad student making one bad request for one fraudulent essay. This seems to be a client that consistently and systematically makes money on the platform in this way. 

I agree with you Phyllis except for one thing you said:

 

>> The proliferation of academic fraud is so rampant and so blatant that many of us have given up trying to help UW police it

 

It should not be our place to help UW police it. It's up to UW. I have better things to do than to police bad apples on the platform.


Vladimir G wrote:

Hi Renata,

 

Please note that we have a dedicated team tasked with reviewing questionable jobs and it's best to report your findings while flagging the job post, since they will be able to make a final determination after reviewing all the evidence and take appropriate steps if needed. As we advised before, we can't comment on reports of suspected ToS violations publicly. I'll check the private messages you sent me for the job post link and submit a request for review from my end as well. Thanks for flagging!


__________________________________________

 

Vlad,

 

We have long noted your "dedicated team", but they seem to view "questionable jobs" in a very different way from concerned freelancers and those educational bodies who are extremely worried about this really very insidious and serious problem. 

 

Upwork's dedicated team do zap a few isolated cheaters, but they do not zap the serious mills that are consistently making money for Upwork, but at the expense of academic integrity. Not only that, freelancers, if not encouraged, are certainly allowed to compound the problem. 

 

None of us are asking for a comment from CS (which in fact we get generically) when we flag fraud; we are asking that "clients" dealing in academic fraud - even when they have made Upwork thousands of dollars - be removed from the site - as well as those freelancers who think cheating is OK.

 

It simply means that Upwork condones cheating provided it is disguised euphemistically (euphemism is not something that CS is trained to recognize), or if it goes underground in the form of private invitation. Sooner or later, someone in the academic B & M world  is going to call Upwork out on this. 

 

This is a serious issue - not just a few crackpot editors and writers ranting on the forum.  

 

Quote:

"This is a serious issue - not just a few crackpot editors and writers ranting on the forum."

Thousands of kudos to this and everything else that has been said!!

 

kat303
Community Member

I am an educator so this topic is of GREAT concern to me. Your dedicated team is either turning a blind eye to these types of clients because, as stated in another post, perhaps they are bringing in a lot of money. Let's face it, and be honest, making a profit is what Upwork is all about. 

 

Perhaps your dedicated team is made up of people who come from countries where this type of "cheating", - where essay mills are legal. 

Perhaps they are made up of people where, even though cheating is illegal, cheating is so rampant that it's almost impossible to contain. 

Perhaps they just don't know the meaning of academic, assignments, homework, reports, contained in a job's description. 

And perhaps, the job descriptions doesn't mention any of the above, but contains a link and when opened, will show it's 110% academic. but the dedicated team doesn't open it.

 

I too have reported many times jobs that are academic in nature. Most of the time they never are taken down, The majority of them stay open for days before they are taken down. (more then enough time to not only find freelancers, but also to get the job done.)

 

And what about the freelancers who apply to these academic jobs? Aren't they violating yoiur TOS? 

I really want to hear from Vladimir again on this topic. This thread (and many others on this forum) make it clear that people are upset about this issue, and that some tangible action needs to be taken to address it. Upwork should be learning from the likes of Uber and Airbnb that they can't claim to be a disinterested third party when their platform is used to break the law.

 

As others have mentioned, beyond legal trouble UW also has a social obligation to preserve academic integrity. It's clear that there are other websites that publicly advertise cheating services, so Upwork might not be able to solve the larger societal problem, but I don't want to support a company that *knowingly* facilitates academic cheating in any form.

 

A lengthy (and frequently ineffectual) investigation for every isolated instance is not a valid response. Asking users to police your platform is a serious cop-out for a company whose only substantial operational cost is customer support. 20% of every transaction on your platform should be able to fund a better "dedicated team" to handle this pervasive problem.

lucidwebmarketng
Community Member

Hi Renata. I haven't read any of the responses (yet) to your post but I'll be blunt here.

 

In short, Upwork doesn't care. To them, the more jobs are posted, the more chance the job poster selects someone which means money in UW's pocket. They see themselves as a third-party, a go-between making things easier for a job poster to find a freelancer and vice versa. They just don't care if someone gets screwed in the arrangement and they can just wash their hands if that happens. Maybe "don't care" is a little harsh but that's the perception.

 

It's not just in one type of job either. A freelancer can get screwed no matter what service they provide. There are cheaters all over and, sorry to say, some fellow Canadians too apparently.

 

If a freelancer complains about a client, it won't matter much because they can just open a new account under a different name and start over and do the same. I highly doubt UW can detect all of them.

 

So that's my two cents.


Pierre L wrote:

Hi Renata. I haven't read any of the responses (yet) to your post but I'll be blunt here.

 

In short, Upwork doesn't care. To them, the more jobs are posted, the more chance the job poster selects someone which means money in UW's pocket. They see themselves as a third-party, a go-between making things easier for a job poster to find a freelancer and vice versa. They just don't care if someone gets screwed in the arrangement and they can just wash their hands if that happens. Maybe "don't care" is a little harsh but that's the perception.

 

It's not just in one type of job either. A freelancer can get screwed no matter what service they provide. There are cheaters all over and, sorry to say, some fellow Canadians too apparently.

 

If a freelancer complains about a client, it won't matter much because they can just open a new account under a different name and start over and do the same. I highly doubt UW can detect all of them.

 

So that's my two cents.


Pierre, I hope you've read the whole thread now and realize that this discussion is not about FLs being cheated. Academic fraud is an entirely different, unrelated, issue. Let's not muddy the water, please.

alexandernovikov
Community Member

It's hard for me to even see what's wrong here to be honest. In Russia we have massively popular, openly marketed sites (i won't cite the links here coz might be it's not allowed here, but easy to google) that provide similar services and i guess it's absolutely legit here from every respect at all. It's uni's job to figure out the scammers (mostly they just do it to confront students and bribe them for as if not mentioning).

 

Never had to do with anything of that, but even if it's not allowed, it is very low down the list of 'most outrageous frauds' either on the Upwork platform, or in how academic system works.

Alexander, thanks for a candid, dissenting opinion. It prompted me to do a little googling, and I found this article on academic fraud that takes an international perspective (I haven't fact-checked it, but I don't think it's a fabrication): https://wenr.wes.org/2017/12/academic-fraud-corruption-and-implications-for-credential-assessment

Anyway, you're probably not alone in downplaying the seriousness of academic fraud. On the other hand, it's cause for concern when unqualified students are admitted to medical schools, to give one example.

__________________________________________________
"No good deed goes unpunished." -- Clare Boothe Luce


Alexander N wrote:

It's hard for me to even see what's wrong here to be honest. In Russia we have massively popular, openly marketed sites (i won't cite the links here coz might be it's not allowed here, but easy to google) that provide similar services and i guess it's absolutely legit here from every respect at all. It's uni's job to figure out the scammers (mostly they just do it to confront students and bribe them for as if not mentioning).

 

Never had to do with anything of that, but even if it's not allowed, it is very low down the list of 'most outrageous frauds' either on the Upwork platform, or in how academic system works.



Personally, I'd rather be treated by the nurse who legitimately passed his or her program requirements. Would'n't you?  I'm sure most people would prefer aerornautic and structural engineers who can do the math. Nursing and engineering students love to shop here as well. 


Edited to ad this: Last night I also ran across a job called "ghostwrite, PhD."

 

Thought I'd mention that the FBI seems to take academic fraud seriously:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-uncover-massive-college-entrance-exam-cheating-plot-n98213...

However, not sure they have any jurisdiction over freelancers outside the US.

__________________________________________________
"No good deed goes unpunished." -- Clare Boothe Luce


John K wrote:

Thought I'd mention that the FBI seems to take academic fraud seriously:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-uncover-massive-college-entrance-exam-cheating-plot-n98213...

However, not sure they have any jurisdiction over freelancers outside the US.


Thanks for posting, John!

 

Upwork itself is subject to both California and US laws against fraud. It is in its interest to observe those laws, not to abet their violation, and to be aware of current enforcement practices.

 

While Upwork may claim—dubiously—a hands-off attitude toward the formation of contracts here, it cannot afford to actively or passively facilitate onsite fraud and potential crime once such activity has been brought to its attention. Even less can it afford to maintain a systemically inadequate response to that activity, and least of all, suspicion that it goes easy on profitable offenders.

Ph.D. is safe, they are useless anyway. My wife worked in uni where they did a lot of work and it was a scam house, basically whole thing is a scam from its inception and they don't even mention it because that's the way it was since before WWII i guess.

 

Nurses and engineers - yeah sounds scary!

lysis10
Community Member

Even Aunt Becky dun goofed.  https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/college-admissions-cheating-felicity-huffman-lori-loughlin/index.ht...

 

You know the parents that had to pay $6 million compared to the others that just paid $500k has one seriously dumb kid.

yitwail
Community Member


Jennifer M wrote:

Even Aunt Becky dun goofed.  https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/college-admissions-cheating-felicity-huffman-lori-loughlin/index.ht...

 

You know the parents that had to pay $6 million compared to the others that just paid $500k has one seriously dumb kid.


Maybe it's supply & demand; the better the school, the more you pay. In a way, this might be good publicity for some of the schools, to get mentioned in the same breath with the likes of Yale & Stanford.

__________________________________________________
"No good deed goes unpunished." -- Clare Boothe Luce
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