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

[Vladimir G]

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. 

[Petra R]

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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

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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...

[Maria T]

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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. 

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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.

[Virginia F]

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.

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[Jennifer M]

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

THe account sellers are evolving.

[Renata S]

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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.

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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. 

[John K]

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.

[Virginia F]

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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.

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

[Renata S]

Virginia F. wrote:

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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.

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

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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.

[Petra R]

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...)