I had never setup an Upwork profile before so I said no, after which they responded with a link to a profile of someone that was completely impersonating me. They had scraped my LinkedIn page for information and were interviewing under the guise of being someone they were not (they were even using my picture). I talked to Upwork support, and after about 36 hours they deleted the impersonator. However, I just did another search and there is already someone else impersonating me again (this time they changed the face on the picture).
I only discovered this because the first impersonator was too lazy to change my resume they downloaded from my website and kept my real email on it, so some companies had used that email to contact me instead of their Upwork registered email.
I would recommend everyone search for their name on Upwork (I had to wrap mine in quotes to find the matches) and make sure they aren't being impersonated.
In the meantime, Upwork really needs a better validation mechanism. As engineers we really have no recourse, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent this from happening.
We needed a Django developer. Put an ad on Upwork at the high end of the recommended salary range. The ad specified US Eligible worker for legal reasons.
Of the 10 or so applicants, seven flat out refused to appear on webcam so I decided to talk to the eighth.
This person claim to be in Seattle. Having lived there I asked them two relatively simple questions. First, can you see the space needle from where you’re sitting? Answer: Yes.
Second, what color is the bubbly music museum next door? Obviously, this is a trick given it’s multicolored. My candidate, who did not lack bravado, guesses white.
I get that being born into particular circumstances is luck of the draw. On the other hand there’s a reason that people are willing to pay more to hire US-based workers.
I believe this has become a general societal problem. People running so called two-sided marketplaces regularly fail to take responsibility for gaming by one side. I would further argue that Upwork has even more responsibility given the monitoring of and commission they take from an ongoing relationship.
The US probably has too many regulations - in my opinion - concerning immigrant workers; however, no temp agency could get away with what Upwork is doing without facing severe repercussions.
I’d like to see Upwork punished.
The EMP isn't a music museum any more, it's now the Museum of Pop Culture. I can get being confused by that one :)
I went to the Space Needle three years ago and I wouldn't be able to answer that question. I wouldn't assume that someone who lives in Seattle goes through the Space Needle area on a daily basis; it's quite touristy.
This comes from someone who lives in touristy areas. Ask me what color a building is next to my statehouse (just walked by a few weeks ago,) or next to the famous place that Elvis was photographed by that I drive by almost every day, and I wouldn't be able to tell you.
Somebody is impersonating me on dating sites and blackmailing women. They convince their victims to send nude photos, and then they threaten to send the photos to their families. The scammer (or scammers) use photos of me that used to be publicly available on social media. They also use my real name, presumably so that the victims see a legitimate LinkedIn profile when they google "me".
Years ago, I got called to a meeting with my work's Human Resources department. The victim had looked me up and emailed my company. HR told me that "I" had to stop doing this. When I realized what had happened, I knew that I couldn't do anything to make it stop. Thankfully HR didn't take any action, but the whole time I worked there I had low-level background anxiety that another victim would contact them.
Last month, a different victim messaged me on LinkedIn because she was suspicious of "my" profile on OKCupid. She sent me screenshots of the profile and messages. The scammer used obviously non-native english, so at least there's some credible evidence that it's not actually me.
I've only become aware of the two incidents above, but I'm sure there are many other victims. I emailed OKCupid to ask them to block the impersonator, but I don't know if they can even stop him from re-registering, and there are other dating sites. I no longer have recent photos publicly available, and I've locked down all social media, but I don't want to delete my LinkedIn.
What else can I do? Has anyone else had something like this happen to them?
You probably wouldn't be able to collect from the scammer (who is likely in another country), but I guarantee you'll get OKCupid's legal department's attention, and they might be able to put a stop to it.
The lawsuit would also create a paper trail that you can use to exonerate yourself in the future.
Sadly, this is unlikely to be the sort of case an attorney would take on contingency.
I'm thinking about doing something private but formalized, like having a lawyer send a letter to OKCupid summarizing recent events and demanding they take down profiles impersonating me. I could share that letter with my (new) employer if another victim ever contacted them directly. I know it wouldn't really prove anything, but it might be convincing to HR. Last time, the HR representative didn't seem to believe me, which definitely made me feel terrible and theoretically could have affected my career.
Thanks to the tragedy of a common name in my country, I’ve had to petition multiple jurisdictions to procure paperwork for a very similar reason.
Only became a necessity when applying for a job and being asked, once the background check came back for someone who had not only the same name but also birthdate 700 miles away if I had been convicted of extortion and blackmail.
How that had never come up before I hit my late thirties is anyone’s guess, since the conviction was recent enough to get someone looking more closely, but not so long ago that again I’m surprised that moment was the first anyone had asked me about it after doing a background check.
Long story short, a few letters to the jurisdictions in question and $500 worth of help from a local attorney and I soon had official papers saying “No, the Bob Loblaw applying for your job is not THAT Bob Loblaw we threw the book at.”
Trying to get plenty of fish, bumble, tinder to respond was impossible.
Since there were very few photos of me publicly available online I feel I should be able to blacklist photos of me to these providers so people can’t use prepackaged profiles of me.
After he was deported, I was messaged by about 15 women in the US who were catfished by the same profile(s).
I feel there is some forum somewhere where people pass around these prepackaged profiles of people who they feel are good ‘candidates’ to impersonate.
Really disturbing
It's horrible to think that my photos are being used for this and there's nothing I can do about it. Even if I cover myself legally, people are still going to be victimized. I hope I never have to involve the police.
The scam is basically to find someone with a lot of friends and copy their profile, pictures and all. Once they’ve done that, they reconnect and have an emergency that requires the friend send money. People naturally see the profile photo and name and think their friend is in real trouble.
With all of Facebook’s efforts to de-anonymize users, how is it possible that they’ve done nothing to prevent foreign scanners from blatantly copying accounts?
Would you mind suggesting how to word it?
As others have said, you probably need to start the legal train rolling so you can subpeona OkCupid and co.
I no longer have any public photos available except on LinkedIn. I will consider taking that down.
At best, they can make it slightly harder to impersonate a user by requiring MFA and detecting duplicate accounts (ie, accounts using the same picture). I think stuff like this will only get worse over time.
As an example, I recently hired someone who showed his face on video and had great communication skills. Next time we did a call, he had no video and sounded totally different. It turned out to be a subcontractor impersonating him.
now? I've heard similar horror stories going back years. Perhaps you were lucky in that you got more positive than negative out of it earlier?
Recently I had thought that maybe prices had gone up, and I was just not paying enough for the honest, individual contractors, but even at $120+/hr, we were getting people misrepresenting their skills or trying to trick us with subcontractors.
https://mtlynch.io/upwork-scammer/
tl; dr - I caught an Upwork freelancer blatantly copying other freelancers profiles. I reported it to Upwork, who said they'd handle it but couldn't tell me the details I reached out to the freelancer's other clients to tell them the freelancer was a fraud, and they said Upwork had never notified them.
You mean...the account privacy of someone pretending to be me?
Me: "So... you're charging what is my credit card, you've verified my identity, you acknowledge this order was placed in my name, and you're happy to take my money, but you won't tell me where 'my' order was sent?"
Sears(!): "Yes, that's correct".
Called the bank... got a 'fraudulent charge' form faxed(!) to me, which I filled out and sent back same day.
From the screenshots, I could identify other projects they worked on and other Upwork accounts they were using.
For every good experience, we have had about four bad experiences. The Upwork marketplace is filled with accounts pretending to be in North America and using fake photos. If you start looking at the profile pics on Upwork, you'll see they have the fake teeth from thispersondoesnotexist.
We've accidentally hired some of these fake people. Not only can they code, but they are pretty good. Upwork usually freezes the contractor's account when they try to get their first payout and fail the identity verification. Then we get a request from the contractor to pay by Paypal. It's a mess.
Here's the chat response from one of the contractors when they were found out:
> OK, let me explain. > To be honest, i am based on China. > But i can complete the task really well. > But i can't work with high rate on upwork as Chinese. > I am really sorry for that. > You can confirm me through video call. > Anyway, i am really good developer in Bootstrap 4 and css3, Html5 and etc. > you can check my result.
Upwork should be doing more to fix this. They are very aware of the issue. I once emailed their old CEO about the issue and got a reply from an assistant offering an account credit.
I wish there was a good alternative!
So, yes, your accomplishments in multiple different forms can be claimed by someone else. It can pay to be aware of this, but there's a cost to staying on top of it. Make sure to balance the two.
> Please know that as soon as the freelancer applies or is offered a contract, we would run an identity verification process which would have them submit a Government-issued ID and have a quick video chat or send us a selfie to prove their identity.
However, this is way too late in the process for my liking...and who knows how strict they actually are?
Side note, I cringe at that thought, I did some mturk work long time ago, had to scan people's photos on a random social network site. Tinder has this "verify" thing you stick your tongue out to the left, some worker somewhere sees it face #5753 and hits okay.
We had a specific project that required hardware to be shipped to the vendor, and required it to be in the US, and people would just lie, openly, as if when the time comes to ship the hardware to them I'm not going to notice it's going to China or a reshipper.
I have always said no, but this is another way upwork may have an impersonation problem. Using accounts with a great track record, then selling the login information to someone else to pretend to be them. Then when you hire someone, it isn't actually them.
Need to find some way to automatically do reader mode whenever opening a Medium or Substack page.
I sometimes hire from upwork. My litmus test is simple. I want to talk to you for 5-10 mins on video. If you cannot show up or have issues doing a video meeting, I won't proceed. It may help getting rid of scammers who are hiding behind a fake profile. I remember one guy telling me that he has speech issues and can only "interact" through messages/email. Even if true, I cannot trust someone on the internet like that.
Having zero cost of goods sold makes it possible to undercut on prices and pay for all your acquisition and still make a buck. Doesn't seem scalable or sustainable, but it has been a real nuisance for us. Translators are contacting us for their payment...
Upwork has not been willing to help us at all. They pull the ads quickly so by the time support clicks the link, the ad is down. They act as if it didn't happen if the link doesn't still work. Crazy.
There is a lot of fraud out there. Anything you can imagine and then quite a bit you can't if you don't spend your time thinking about how to screw others.
I think the value of LinkedIn is diminishing and will continue to decline.
If I want to get in touch with someone I worked with ages ago, LinkedIn is still a good way, or even the only way. The value will decline if people stop adding contacts when they meet new people. Is that happening?
I don't see how that would be the case, it's the de-facto rolodex for your work-circle and I don't think I know any alternative that is getting popular.
But this goes towards the GPs post, it is public information. I also deleted my LinkedIn awhile ago. In my opinion a company or person should only be given my CV when I offer it to them.
In terms of a work-circle rolodex, this is odd to me. If I want to keep in contact with the person in the future I will have their personal contact info and keep in touch, otherwise not.
Turns out that someone was impersonating me on Upwork.
I now have a call with a potential real client next week.
I feel like I need to go cybersquat my identity everywhere now.
Not sure if anyone actually responds positively to these DMs but I guess if they do it feeds into the same scam.
Upwork takes a commission, so they are benefitting financially from this fraud. You absolutely have recourse.
I hired an editor (not on Upwork) who had worked for a number of very famous authors (people you've heard of, people who've sold millions of copies). They did a fantastic sample edit, and the quality of the work dropped off precipitously by about the 20% point of the manuscript. The best-case scenario is that they just didn't care, because I'm a nobody and because of the novel's length--over 250K words, so self-publishing is the only option. However, there's a lot of forensic evidence suggesting that they farmed the edit out to more than one person (which would explain the inconsistent apparent level of skill and care). So I started looking into this, and apparently this is a common practice. Being traditionally published won't necessarily help you; the big houses contract out most of their editing work, and the same thing can happen.
Software might have the opposite problem from fiction editing, though. With editing, the issue is that the money (at all stages) is so poor--the average novel only sells a couple thousand copies--that I imagine a lot of people feel they have to do this sort of thing to survive. In software, these problems tend to involve there being far too much money at stake.
Notice, for example, you're not helping it decay, your story can't be tied to the bad actor. You have good reasons for this, but it's why the scam works.
The key correlate to understand from "Extracting value from the brand" is that when the process is complete, there is no value left in the brand. It's explicitly setting up a con, defecting from the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Lying with more words.
My favorite examples of this pattern are from other areas of endeavor: Kitchen Aid mixers, which used to be an industrial quality offshoot of Hobart and now is trash; and Singer, which used to be a superb sewing machine, and now is trash.
But you can see the pattern in many places.
I'm sorry about your experience.
But you might be interested in knowing that that phenomenon goes way back -- a lot of the "old masters" paintings were done by apprentice artists working under some level of supervision from the "named" painters. And I'm talking about really famous painters like Rembrandt or Reubens.
Also quite a few of the most prolific contemporary mass market authors have "assistants.
I told my new editor what I paid to hire the big-name editor and she said, "You could've gotten a book [as in a ghostwriter] for that."
And yeah, I'm well aware of the authors who farm out their names. If you're writing formulaic commercial work, why not? I don't begrudge their existing; I just wish they didn't take up so much marketing and publicity oxygen (but, on the other hand, if the commercial hacks weren't using that up, it'd go to overconnected MFA "literary" hacks, so... no worse for it?)
