Hello Upwork Community!
My name is Caitlyn, and I have the privilege of leading our Trust & Safety Operations team, whose members work each day to keep the Upwork platform and our customers safe.
Meet the Team:
In total, Upwork’s Trust & Safety organization is composed of over 300 team members spanning Operations, Engineering, Product Management, Payment Risk, Anti-Money Laundering, and Machine Learning Detections. We are a team of engineers, analysts, data scientists, former law enforcement, and intelligence professionals tasked with keeping Upwork safe.
As our marketplace has scaled, we’ve bolstered our investments in Trust & Safety through automated detections, best-in-class vendor partnerships, and expanded human review. Keeping the Upwork platform and our customers safe at the scale that Upwork now operates is a considerable responsibility, the weight of which the Upwork team takes on with respect and consideration for how our work and decisions impact our customers.
Trust in the Upwork Marketplace:
On Upwork, we support our community of clients and freelancers by continuously monitoring for and mitigating risks, in turn keeping our customers safer.
Being proactive about the safety of the Upwork platform is at the heart of how we work. The vast majority of the cases our Trust and Safety team members review are generated by our internal detection systems. In fact, over 90% of our investigations are generated by our proactive detections. The balance comes from customer reports from clients and freelancers like you.
While we of course value customer reports, our goal is that when content or users don’t align with our policies, we proactively remove that content and those individuals from the platform as appropriate before well-intentioned customers are impacted.
Trust & Safety’s Mission:
As a Trust & Safety organization, it’s our mission each and every day to increase trust within the world’s work marketplace. We accomplish this by:
- Improving the overall customer experience by removing individuals and content that are misaligned with Upwork’s Terms of Service, policies, and values
- Preventing fraudulent activity and reducing its impact on Upwork, and all clients and freelancers who operate on our platform
- Ensuring that our customers accurately represent themselves, thereby extending the trust that customers place in Upwork to the wider community
Flagging Suspicious Activity:
While we strive for proactive removal whenever possible, bad actors are constantly shifting their approach to evade detection and will on occasion be visible on the platform.
In the event you find content or an individual on the platform that you believe is misaligned with what is allowed on Upwork, please know that we encourage you to flag it for review. You can learn more about reporting suspicious activity here (whether it’s in a job post, the messaging center, or an individual’s profile).
Want to Know More?
Trust & Safety will be partnering with our Community team to bring you regular posts about our investments to make the platform safer and more trustworthy. Additionally, we’ll be providing more Trust & Safety policy content within the Community in the coming weeks.
You can also view Trust & Safety’s recent blog post here and webinar event here. Watch this space for more to come!
Up We Go!
Caitlyn
