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romi88
Community Member

Scams!!!

Hello! I’ve worked in Upwork for several years. I know it is forbidden that a job post contains contact information, for example, telegram or phone number. But I don’t know what’s happening??!! Since a few weeks ago, the section “Find Work'' has been full of scams. It 's obvious. And it’s really annoying to look for a job and see an entire page of scams. Please, do something. Revise job post before publishing it. Upwork is losing its reputation.
Thank you!

12 REPLIES 12
yofazza
Community Member

Welcome to scamhaven! Job feed is infested with such posts for, 2 months now?

 

Victims reporting to this forum almost everyday (there's more who doesn't come to this forum ). I counted at least 3 person who have lost over $1000 in the past 3 weeks, one lost around $3000, and a lot who are lost only around tenth or hundreds of dollars.

 

Upwork knows, but they're taking one easy slow step at a time to address it. I don't blame them too much on this, because they do need to be very careful to prevent something like this to the money source. That guy already paid, otherwise he might not bother.

 

A good method to prevent more victims, without vetting/scaring client away is to tell freelancers to read this post. Maybe by putting it in the freelancer's dashboard, or sending a mass message, to cut the food source! Without the food, they'll stop. But not right now (see paragraph 2).

 

But Upwork don't do that too, which leads to a speculation that there might be some benefits by doing this "nature selection" to the freelancers. They have an unlimited supply of it anyway.

 

In the mean time, we can filter the feed. Normal jobs are still there, without noticeable decline in the past few monhts.:

 

Don't forget to select your categories, adjust it more to your liking, save the search, and a shortcut will appear in your feed.

4aa2f95c
Community Member

A prospective client just replied my proposal asking me to make a security fee payment to his payneer account.

It's scam right??

YES.

joerowan
Community Member

>> I don't blame them too much on this....

 

I do.

 

This has been going on for at least 3 months now. That is well enough time for significant action to have been taken. Instead, we get the same threads on 'how to filter' while the scammers find new ways to get around those same techniques. 

 

There are some clear, simple and effected methods that could have been implemented, but they have not. So now a good portion of each day is spent evaluating posts that should have never seen the light of day.

Sadly, I must agree.

romi88
Community Member

I agree with you 100%. 

It is clear that Upwork is not filtering out jobs that ask you to communicate off platform with them in the actual job tilte or the job description. A simple search for Telegram and WhatsApp show more than 2800 of them up right now. Why won't Upwork perform the same simple search and remove them? We would if we could but we can't. All we can do is block them from showing up in our saved searches.

>> Why won't Upwork perform the same

>> simple search and remove them?

 

It makes absolutely no sense. This cycle of the 'scam wave' is the worst I have ever seen including going back to the Elance years. It feels like the towel has been thrown in but the ref didn't see it and all we can do is wait for the bell to ring to stop the beating and blood bath. 

 

It is mind boggling.

 

smh

If you search for the phrase in parenthesis ( t dot me, or telegram, or whats app, or message me) there is a staggering figure of 5,693 outright scams found through an Upwork search in the writing category. No wonder Upwork has taken no action to stop them. This figure does not include the numerous "get $12,000 for writing words already written" posts. The numbers vary. Then you can use the same search to block the vast majority of scams. Unfortunately, it is not just a matter of inconvenience and endless hours of flagging. This Golly! Should we rush to tell Upwork of a solution based on numerous freelancers' posts?

 

 

 

Hourly

Fixed-Price
Less than $100
$100 - $500
$500 - $1k
$1k - $5k
$5k+
Category: Writing
5,693 jobs found

 

Upwork is aware of this but they continue to be in our feeds even though they are clearly violating Upwork's own ToS.

Hi Peter and Jeanne,

 

Thank you for your message. I have shared your report with the relevant team to review and take action on the flagged job posts. 

 

Thank you

Pradeep

Upwork
nhansen
Community Member

Sometimes the same ad, sometimes with just small variations, is getting repeatedly posted in succession. So you see a page of results with the same add taking up the vast majority of slots on that page. I presume in some cases it is the same user doing it in rapid succession. Even if a legitimate client were to do that, it should be considered spam, because they would probably be doing it to get around the invitation limits. 

 

I don't report ads unless I find this sort of thing only after opening the ad. It's not worth my time opening them from the feed to do so. There's an icon to give a job ad a thumbs down from the feed but it would be easier to report the most obvious of these if there was a report spam option from the feed as well.

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