The average person does not pore over the ToS of any site, let's get that one out of the way. Moreover, the average person isn't going to a jobs platform, and expecting 1 in 5 to as much as 1 in 3 jobs posted being a scam (depending on the category, yes I know that many categories have far less scams, but particularly lower-skilled categories suffer from scams disproportionately).
New freelancers have been scammed on this platform day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year. Nothing changes, including the shaming language directed toward new freelancers, while scammers get a free pass (who, of course, break the ToS over-and-over-and-over with impunity, and without even any shaming language directed at them).
There are concrete and very simple steps UW could take (a few lines of code) to prevent scams being advertised on this platform in the first place, and many of us here have explicitly stated what those steps are, and we get ignored, and sometimes receive condescending and out-right insulting remarks in doing so. There is no data hygeine on this platform. It's an unfiltered stream of user-generated content that allows complete nonsense to be published as "jobs". The only fault anyone can lay on a new freelancer is that they had higher expectations than anticipating up to 1 in 3 jobs actually being a scam on one of the better known jobs platforms. They have a higher expectation because all other major platforms DO practice basic data hygeine, and users rightly have the expectation that UW would practice similar basic security filtering of user-generated content. They don't do it, and somehow this becomes the fault of new freelancers.
Only up until about a week ago, UW allowed email addresses to be published in jobs descriptions. Prior to that change, as many as a third of jobs posted in writing-related jobs were soliciting for freelancers to apply by email. You can't make this up. Now I see they've taken the step to remove email addresses from jobs descriptions. This is such a basic thing to do that most web developers were doing as far back as the 1990s. If UW have a spare few minutes, they could then remove Telegram, WhatsApp, and other URLs from private messages (naked or obfuscated) - a job that many of us here have asked UW to do over the years. Preventing such "jobs" being posted prevents even the possibility of a scam, and it disincentivises scammers. Scammers use UW because it works for them. Blaming their victims has never prevented scams happening. If the opportunity to deploy a scam becomes that much more difficult, there will be a massive reduction in scams.
But where were we? UW's policy to tackle scams seems to use the motto "work harder, not smarter". So...let's keep manually flagging the jobs that could have been automatically prevented from being posted in the first place. Let's keep talking about scams on the forum. A pound of cure is better than an ounce of prevention! (Oh, shouldn't it be the other way around?).
I guess all I can do is keep shaming UW (where your shame SHOULD be directed) on this forum. I did get one victory - they did remove email addresses from jobs descriptions. That few lines of code they employed has saved a ton of wasted energy in flagging, complaining, returning connects. The content writing category looks a lot cleaner now. Praise where praise is due.
You'd surely agree that it would be better if there was a massive reduction in scams to fall for in the first place, right?
To end on a positive note, I think UW will be employing the aforementioned filtering sooner than later based on recent changes I've seen, and I'll be the first to praise UW for taking the right steps in preventing dangerous/misleading content from being published on this site.
Community Manager
