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petra_r
Community Member

"The Aussie Voice" is dead. Long live "UX/UI designer who is fond of colors and attractive designs"

After the sad demise of the "Aussie voice" - meet the "UX/UI designer who is fond of colors and attractive designs and quiet"

 

All 500 of them... Rising Talents among them.

 

Already escalated to Trust & Safety as of a few minutes ago.

 

ACCEPTED SOLUTION


Jennifer R wrote:

What do you call it when there are 38 with the same photo?


Identical trigintaoctuplets.

View solution in original post

85 REPLIES 85
jr-translation
Community Member

What do you call it when there are 38 with the same photo?**Edited for Community Guidelines**

Thank you for flagging this Jennifer,

 

I`ve already escalated it to our team to be investigated further. 

~ Goran
Upwork

re: "What do you call it when there are 38 with the same photo?"

 

I call it a good reason to take the time to create an automatic algorithm that checks newly submitted profile photos against all existing photos... in order to flag fraudulent freelancer activity.


Preston H wrote:

I call it a good reason to take the time to create an automatic algorithm that checks newly submitted profile photos against all existing photos... in order to flag fraudulent freelancer activity.


And do the same with text.

 

It can't be that difficult to develop some algorithm that detects hundreds and hundreds of identical overviews. Those are all 100% identical.

 

The Aussie voices were dozens. These are hundreds.

 

The other fun things is that they are all identical, same text, same country, same education, same portfolio, same everything, yet a decent proportion has Rising Talent status...

 

mtngigi
Community Member


Petra R wrote:

Preston H wrote:

I call it a good reason to take the time to create an automatic algorithm that checks newly submitted profile photos against all existing photos... in order to flag fraudulent freelancer activity.


And do the same with text.

 

It can't be that difficult to develop some algorithm that detects hundreds and hundreds of identical overviews. Those are all 100% identical.

 

The Aussie voices were dozens. These are hundreds.

 

The other fun things is that they are all identical, same text, same country, same education, same portfolio, same everything, yet a decent proportion has Rising Talent status...

 


I think it's high time Upwork gets rid of Rising Talent, or at least make sure it's a badge that is earned correctly - I have to believe the RT badge is also given by a flawed algorithm. Think of all the clients who use this as a requirement that are being duped.


Virginia F wrote:


I think it's high time Upwork gets rid of Rising Talent, or at least make sure it's a badge that is earned correctly - I have to believe the RT badge is also given by a flawed algorithm. Think of all the clients who use this as a requirement that are being duped.


I completely agree. There are daily complaints from freelancers who don't understand why they haven't got Rising Talent status despite having fulfilled all of the requirements, and when I've looked at the profiles of those who have it versus those who don't, it definitely looks like it's determined by algorithm and not by merit. Those badges are very misleading and it's obvious that some people have figured out how to game the system.


Christine A wrote:

Virginia F wrote:


I think it's high time Upwork gets rid of Rising Talent, or at least make sure it's a badge that is earned correctly - I have to believe the RT badge is also given by a flawed algorithm. Think of all the clients who use this as a requirement that are being duped.


I completely agree. There are daily complaints from freelancers who don't understand why they haven't got Rising Talent status despite having fulfilled all of the requirements, and when I've looked at the profiles of those who have it versus those who don't, it definitely looks like it's determined by algorithm and not by merit. Those badges are very misleading and it's obvious that some people have figured out how to game the system.


I guess we need to unequivocally state what the issue in all this is because I expect some people might be missing it: Not only is UpWork approving reams of fake profiles, but through the Rising Talent designation, they're also making a significant percentage of them look like they've been specially vetted by the company, thereby encouraging clients (especially new ones) to hire the people who produce them. 

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 

 

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless


Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 

 

 


And six, count 'em six, are "Rising Talent". Time to get rid of the RT program.


Virginia F wrote:

Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 

 

 


And six, count 'em six, are "Rising Talent". Time to get rid of the RT program.


The presence of profiles like this clearly illustrates that Rising Talent status is arbitrarily assigned.  It seems impossible that an FL with no contracts and zero earnings could fulfill all of the stated criteria that are supposedly in place to determine who gets it and who doesn't. 


Renata S wrote:

Virginia F wrote:

Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 

 

 


And six, count 'em six, are "Rising Talent". Time to get rid of the RT program.


The presence of profiles like this clearly illustrates that Rising Talent status is arbitrarily assigned.  It seems impossible that an FL with no contracts and zero earnings could fulfill all of the stated criteria that are supposedly in place to determine who gets it and who doesn't. 


Yes ... and the worse of it is this: clients using RT as a job requirement, and/or clients assuming Upwork actually knows/guarantees/suggests that freelancers with this badge are freelancers you want to hire if you're looking for (honest) talent.

 

Seriously Upwork ... we all did fine  without a RT badge - get rid of it. That will also get rid of the hundreds of newbie posts crying about the whereabouts of their 30 free connects, or "why I don't have rising talent badge" yet?   Smiley Frustrated   


Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 


Love all the Irish names! Heart Heart Heart
But they all dropped a letter in this sentence:
One of the recent complex plugin for WP I have coed was an API for a car rental company. Robot Sad

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


John K wrote:

Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 


Love all the Irish names! Heart Heart Heart
But they all dropped a letter in this sentence:
One of the recent complex plugin for WP I have coed was an API for a car rental company. Robot Sad


Maybe the algorithm has been recoded (if that's what it's called) to include "the luck of the Irish". 

 

LOL, and the plot sickens: https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Upwork-Account-Stolen/td-p/701011

I especially like the boy named Aisling, which last time I checked was definitely a female name.  

At least they got the time zones right this time...


John K wrote:

Rene K wrote:

And now we have the Senior JavaScript developpers:

 

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=%22Here%20is%20for%20the%20picky%20ones%20who%20require...

 

Upwork: we never learn from our mistakes!

 


Love all the Irish names! Heart Heart Heart
But they all dropped a letter in this sentence:
One of the recent complex plugin for WP I have coed was an API for a car rental company. Robot Sad


Maybe they all went to the same coed coding academy? 

Yesterday I marked 5 profiles of this batch, they were the only ones that appeared with this copied description. It seems that measures were taken against those, they are no longer on the list.
Curious, yesterday everyone was from Canada, as always, but now they have moved to Ireland Man Frustrated

I just flagged two pages of them, all in Ireland.  Guess they moved overnight?


Jennifer R wrote:

What do you call it when there are 38 with the same photo?


Identical trigintaoctuplets.


Richard W wrote:

Jennifer R wrote:

What do you call it when there are 38 with the same photo?


Identical trigintaoctuplets.


Thanks.

VladimirG
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Petra,

 

Thanks for flagging these profiles, I'll also reach out to our team to make sure we address them asap and investigate further to check for any similar violations. Please feel free to send us a private message if you come across similar profiles, so we can check and confirm whether these are already on our radar and are being actioned. 

~ Vladimir
Upwork


Vladimir G wrote:

 

 I'll also reach out to our team to make sure we address them asap and investigate further to check for any similar violation


Thanks Vladimir!

 

Someone sure invested a hell of a lot of time creating 500 email accounts, find all the fake pictures, create all the profiles etc...


Vladimir G wrote:

Hi Petra,

 

Thanks for flagging these profiles, I'll also reach out to our team to make sure we address them asap and investigate further to check for any similar violations. Please feel free to send us a private message if you come across similar profiles, so we can check and confirm whether these are already on our radar and are being actioned. 


And, perhaps, it is time, as someone said long ago, close Upwork for new profiles for a while, and do a deep cleaning before admitting anyone else.
And, of course, during this time, develop what both Preston and Petra comment.
This latest discovery of repeated profiles, with repeated photos, with names, portfolios, studies and others, false, I think it should be the straw that broke the glass.

Vladimir G. wrote:

Hi Petra,

 

Thanks for flagging these profiles, I'll also reach out to our team to make sure we address them asap and investigate further to check for any similar violations. Please feel free to send us a private message if you come across similar profiles, so we can check and confirm whether these are already on our radar and are being actioned. 

 

 

And yet, flags and pms I send about fraud profiles are ignored. It appears that as long as someone is making money, it doesn't matter about lies on their profiles.

 

Smiley Frustrated


 

lysis10
Community Member

lol dannnng I thought there were a lot of UI/UX designers popping up. 500 though wow lol

 

THe account sellers are evolving.

renata101
Community Member


Petra R wrote:

After the sad demise of the "Aussie voice" - meet the "UX/UI designer who is fond of colors and attractive designs and quiet"

 

All 500 of them... Rising Talents among them.

 

Already escalated to Trust & Safety as of a few minutes ago.

 


Petra,

Thanks for initiating a ticket with T&S. I didn't do this myself because I didn't know what kind of response I would get. In the past, I've found the response by T&S to issues like this has been really frustrating. I give them details about how to locate the profiles themselves, and they do little or nothing with the information (I suspect this might be because of the potential to screw up their performance quotas since it represents one huge ticket that will require a lot of time and effort to solve). We saw this with the Aussie Voice profiles, and I don't doubt that we'll see it again. At times I think that all this is doing is helping the profile makers to become a little more sophisticated (although, at present, you don't seem to need a heck of a lot of sophistication to get something approved). 

This is something that really needs to change. Or more to the point, they really should have started addressing this months ago when the AVs first came to light.

And actually, I've been flagging guys with little green halos for months now. This is just the latest evolution in that trend. 


Rising Talents are required to "Adhere to the Upwork Terms of Service" and those terms prohibit "misrepresenting your experience, skills, or information, including by representing another person’s profile, or parts of another person’s profile, as your own", so none of these cloned profiles should ever have received a Rising Talent badge. If all profiles can't be checked for duplicates at this time, I think it would spare Upwork possible embarrassment to check before bestowing a Rising Talent badge.

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


John K wrote:

Rising Talents are required to "Adhere to the Upwork Terms of Service" and those terms prohibit "misrepresenting your experience, skills, or information, including by representing another person’s profile, or parts of another person’s profile, as your own", so none of these cloned profiles should ever have received a Rising Talent badge. If all profiles can't be checked for duplicates at this time, I think it would spare Upwork possible embarrassment to check before bestowing a Rising Talent badge.


Looking forward to a response to this disregard for TOS. How/why is this happening?

Virginia F. wrote:

John K wrote:

Rising Talents are required to "Adhere to the Upwork Terms of Service" and those terms prohibit "misrepresenting your experience, skills, or information, including by representing another person’s profile, or parts of another person’s profile, as your own", so none of these cloned profiles should ever have received a Rising Talent badge. If all profiles can't be checked for duplicates at this time, I think it would spare Upwork possible embarrassment to check before bestowing a Rising Talent badge.


Looking forward to a response to this disregard for TOS. How/why is this happening?


Virginia,

Not to split hairs, but I really would have gone with "this latest disregard for ToS" (that might have been what you meant with the italics).

In the past, I've seen people simply given a hand slap when they've used a fake photo, put up a plagiarized profile overview, copied parts of someone's LinkedIn experience or completely lifted someone else's CV contents verbatim. This doesn't really lead anyone to take it all that seriously. And you can easily earn at least $20K without anyone ever confirming your identity. 

UpWork ToS also clearly applies to academic fraud as well (since it's a violation of the terms of service of most, if not all, academic institutions). It's clearly indicated as a prohibited site use, but you'd never know it based on the way it's handled. And you can easily earn $20K without anyone ever saying anything about this either.
Screen Shot 2019-12-16 at 2.51.29 PM.png

In fairness, not even one of those "fond of colors and a quiet" profiles ever earned a single Dollar, and they are not "new" (3-ish months+)

 

(So they would have been set to private after 50 - 30 days and had to have been re-activated twice or more to still be public...)


Petra R wrote:

In fairness, not even one of those "fond of colors and a quiet" profiles ever earned a single Dollar, and they are not "new" (3-ish months+)


But we don't really know what their purpose is. With the Aussie Voice profiles, they were set up by individuals who wanted to have profiles of their own. And we don't know how many Aussie Rules profiles were set up and changed without detection. 

Here, the absence of harm from the unused profiles doesn't really tell us the full story of whether or not harm is occurring. This might take the form of people buying and selling pre-approved profiles that are quickly changed to update their actual credentials. I imagine a profile with rising talent status would probably go for more than a regular one. If they're not doing that yet, there's certainly the potential for it going in that direction. I don't know why these ones are country specific. Some of the other are not. 



Renata S wrote:

Petra R wrote:

In fairness, not even one of those "fond of colors and a quiet" profiles ever earned a single Dollar, and they are not "new" (3-ish months+)


But we don't really know what their purpose is.


Yes. Exactly.

The mind boggles, I'd love to find the first one but I don't have the timme to trawl through 500 profiles.

Hopefully they'll all go "poof" in a timely manner.

 

If Upwork is really serious about the importance of approval of applications from individuals to use the platform (and heaven knows it should be if it wants the business to succeed), it really needs to ask serious questions of itself as to how the profiles were allowed, and of the employees that did approve them. It's simply not good enough that it's been made aware of the issue by a user of the site.



Richard S wrote:

... and of the employees that did approve them. I


What "employees?"

You can't possibly think the majority of them are ever seen by "an employee?"

 

The program that does it needs to be programmed to search for dupes before approving profiles.

 

Or, better still, stop accepting new freelancers when the majority of them will never win a job anyway and there are already way, WAY more freelancers on the site than can be supported.

 

It's likely that these 500 profiles are just the tip of the iceberg.

 


Ela K wrote:

Renata S wrote:

[...}

And actually, I've been flagging guys with little green halos for months now. This is just the latest evolution in that trend. 


Does that mean you would flag my profile simply because my pic has a "little green halo"?

Because that green frame stands for ... what trend exactly?


Of course not. Take a minute and run a freelancer search for "UX/UI designer who is fond of colors and attractive designs"


You'll see what this thread is about. The green frame (which I think is great) is just something else they have in common.

petra_r
Community Member

Great job, Upwork. The UX/UI designers were all wiped out 🙂

 

We now have a gaggle of Canadian React/Vue/Angular etc peeps. 49 and counting.

 

(1 is genuine. The rest are not)

 

The auto approval of profiles, the lack of copied overviews detection is doing lots of harm. Will Upwork learn eventually?

 

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless


Petra R wrote:

Great job, Upwork. The UX/UI designers were all wiped out 🙂

 

We now have a gaggle of Canadian React/Vue/Angular etc peeps. 49 and counting.

 

(1 is genuine. The rest are not)

 


Great detective, Petra!

I think someone has fallen.
But there are still many Canadian professional full-stack developers Smiley Happy

 

Upwork, have they sneaked out the back door again?


Maria T wrote:


Great detective, Petra!


Can't take all or even most of the credit, Renata found the first ones, I just found the rest of the gaggle


Maria T wrote:

Petra R wrote:

Great job, Upwork. The UX/UI designers were all wiped out 🙂

 

We now have a gaggle of Canadian React/Vue/Angular etc peeps. 49 and counting.

 

(1 is genuine. The rest are not)

 


Great detective, Petra!

I think someone has fallen.
But there are still many Canadian professional full-stack developers Smiley Happy

 

Upwork, have they sneaked out the back door again?


They are also multiplets again.

Valeria K wrote:

Thanks for flagging, Petra. I've escalated this to the team to be addressed urgently.


Thanks Valeria 🙂

 

But the team needs to develop a system that detects duplicates. I am led to believe it is not that technically challenging in the overall scheme of things and considering that the odd ones we stumble upon by sheer accident is only ever the tip of the iceberg, it is desperately needed.

 

Jennifer wrote:


They are also multiplets again.


 yup. Let's urgently add a photo-duplicate-detector to the need-to-do-list.

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