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Renata's avatar
Renata S Community Member

Can someone take these down?

The top 2 are asking freelancers to advertise properties for sale or rent.

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=%22HIRING%21%20HIRING%21%21%20HIRING%21%21%21%22&sort=recen...

This might be a good batch for someone to look at as well. Almost all of them look like they contain contact information and many are looking for ad and marketing specialists to post ads.

https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=specialist%20AND%20%28t.me%20OR%20Telegram%20OR%20wa.me%20O...

9 REPLIES 9
Bojan's avatar
Bojan S Community Manager

Thanks for flagging these, Renata. I have shared both links with our team for a review. 

~ Bojan
Upwork
Renata's avatar
Renata S Community Member

Thanks for your help, Bojan!

Deepak's avatar
Deepak J Community Member

Hi Bojan, I have a question somthing similar was going to start a thread but I think I'd get my answer here.

 

There are several posts which contain zero detail about the project and instead they just put their email addresses in the post and ask to contact. And recently, I just came through with a similar post . The employer payment method is not verified and the mate posted same job three times. Now, when someone directly puts their email, in front of thousands of people and giving work like this. I'm aware that something fishy is going on so, I just skip them.

 

Question: Should I?

 

Second thing, some employers don't have their payment method verified before posting. Now, I understand that doesn't mean that it's fake or something. But when they put some unrealistic amount, I'm a little afraid to apply. Like "deploy a django app on AWS" for $5k fixed amount.

 

Question: Should I give these jobs a shot or ignore them as usual?

 

~ Deepak

Renata's avatar
Renata S Community Member


Deepak J wrote:

Hi Bojan, I have a question somthing similar was going to start a thread but I think I'd get my answer here.

 

There are several posts which contain zero detail about the project and instead they just put their email addresses in the post and ask to contact. And recently, I just came through with a similar post . The employer payment method is not verified and the mate posted same job three times. Now, when someone directly puts their email, in front of thousands of people and giving work like this. I'm aware that something fishy is going on so, I just skip them.

 

Question: Should I?

Hi Deepak, 

On Upwork, right now there are too many questionable posts to flag individually. Last year, if I saw an email address on a posting by a client who didn't have verified payment, I really wouldn't have thought twice about it. It might mean someone didn't know they weren't supposed to add it. 

This year we are experiencing something quite different on Upwork. There are hundred or thousands of scam posts. The ones I asked about had two things: direct contact information and job descriptions that involved posting ads (on Facebook, Craigslist, etc.). There's a popular scam where people post real estate they don't own for sale or rent. Freelancers who agree to do the work will be complicit in fraudulent activities of these clients. The faster these come down, the better. But it's hard to try to flag them individually because there are so many. 

I sometimes try to flag them and add a link to a search that brings up more than one post (it's more efficient to do it this way), but I notice this doesn't work. Trust and Safety will take down the first flagged post, but ignore all the others.  

This freelancer mentioned them in a different post, and I noticed a lot of them today:
https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Constant-Stream-of-Scams/m-p/1051471#M664464

There are too many of them to flag individually. 

Maria's avatar
Maria T Community Member


Bojan S wrote:

Thanks for flagging these, Renata. I have shared both links with our team for a review. 


I don't know who will be checking it, but from the second link right now there are 108 jobs.
How come Upwork can't delete them en masse?
I can't understand it.
Can someone from Upwork explain to us why it is "so" difficult?

Deepak's avatar
Deepak J Community Member

Yes, there should be a ML spam filter like in gmail that would help greatly. But not sure about the complexity with the platform. One more thing can be done here which is pretty easy, I guess. Only allow people post jobs once they have verified their payment method that should not be a big deal for a client who actually want his work to done. And more similar things like these can be done to reduce the spam at greater level, just need to put some time.

 

I saw some posts on the forum about people getting scammed and the one whose account got suspended. I'm afraid not every freelancer working on upwork is well aware this forum (in their conscious) and about these scams, more cases like this can occur very easily even to those who are working for years. I mean there should be an alert system that sends email to every freelancer on weekly basis about these scams and tell them to red flag those posts. If even 50k are doing this, it can be reduced at greater level.

Renata's avatar
Renata S Community Member

Deepak,

I've always been under the impression that they could be doing more in this regard. It seems possible to screen this forum for things that the system consider "foul language" (although people have often expressed their suprised at what the system considers worthy to be censored and "edited for community guidelines"). I don't know how the job board side of things is handled, but it seems like other sites can are able to remove things more quickly (it may take five days to a week to remove the posts I mentioned at the start, and by that time at least a few people will have been scammed).

This is often blamed on new freelancers not knowing the platform well enough, but if this is the case, I think that they shouldn't be allowing people to sign up without having to go through some tests about how the platform works--including how to understand when you've been sent an offer, accepted it and have a contract in place. People who have never had contracts on the platform before often think that they have been hired when they haven't been sent an offer and they don't have a contract. 

You mentioned this:


Deepak J wrote:

One more thing can be done here which is pretty easy, I guess. Only allow people post jobs once they have verified their payment method that should not be a big deal for a client who actually want his work to done. And more similar things like these can be done to reduce the spam at greater level, just need to put some time.

A lot of people feel that potential clients would not want to register payment methods without getting a sense of how the system works. So the thought is that this would scare potential clients. I don't know if registering a payment method would completely solve the problem because it doesn't stop people from using stolen credit cards. 

Deepak's avatar
Deepak J Community Member

Agree!

Checkout this some next level marketing geek:

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

And this:

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

And tens of people are applying to these jobs. Though, I did created saperate threads for this. From the past few day I feel like a police rather than a freelancer who is looking for work. Instead I'm looking for job posts that contain these type of things. **bleep**. I should focus on the work, lol.

 

Renata's avatar
Renata S Community Member

Deepak,

I think you just like mysteries. But it's better to spend your time reading or watching fictional ones than trying to figure this out. Unless someone has direct evidence that something odd is going, Upwork won't shut that guy down even if he does have 30 open jobs and no hires. It doesn't seem like it's vioation any of their rules. Unless they're porn sites or something. I didn't click on the links.

If they are porn sites, you can report them.
https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Why-would-a-Client-cut-amp-paste-post-the-exact-same-job...

Oh, I see. They are Upwork job posts that lead to external job posts, like this one:
**Edited for Community Guidelines**

That one lists a link to this external job post.
**Edited for Community Guidelines**