Rampant Upwork Fraud Discovery — A very expensive lesson learned

If you are looking to hire freelancers on Upwork, be aware of an ongoing ring of fraudulent freelancer and client accounts. The sole purpose of these accounts is to boost the ratings of the freelancer by doing fake jobs for the fake clients.

Over the last several months, I hired and paid a freelancer via one of these fraudulent accounts and this is what I’ve come to learn about their setup.

• Most of the fraudulent freelance accounts use the exact same portfolio items (23snaps — an iPhone app, is one of them — Flirt & Date app is another).
• They always use stock photography for their user photos — if the developer looks like a model, it’s time to dig deeper.
• They get high ratings because they are doing fake work for the same set of clients. When looking at work history, trace the work all the way back to the originating client. Look for small projects that are done for the same client. This is usually a strong indicator.
• That said, not all fake projects are small. It appears that they are using funds from their larger projects to pay their fake developers larger sums to make it appear their profiles are legitimate. This is ultimately how we got sucked in as our developer had more than $15,000 in billed projects.
• For our case, the profile that keeps getting duplicated is one that uses the title “Full Stack iOS and Android App Developer”. If you search for that profile title, you’re bound to find a number of fake profiles.
• Most of the names on the profiles are non-standard English names. The last names get used and re-used and are often names you don’t normally hear.
• We found our initial developer listed as Romanian — but they appear to have expanded to Western European countries as well.
• Don’t count on Upwork to assist in any attempt to reduce the fraud you find. I personally sent them more than 60 fake profiles — all using the same photos, same portfolio items, etc — nearly all of the 60 are still live on the site more than a week later.
• In our situation, Upwork suspended the account of one of our active developers mid-project, but when asked, wouldn’t disclose why the account was suspended. That allowed the developer to craft his own story about why the account was on hold. Within a few weeks, an account with the same name, same photo and portfolio items was live on the site (and still is today).
• These fake accounts owners are unabashed in their approach. My developer emailed me a few days ago, saying, “why even bother contacting Upwork? If they take down 20 profiles of ours today, we’ll have 20 back up tomorrow”. That’s a bit scary.
• Despite many of these fake profiles having 0 billed hours, Upwork will sometimes mark them as a “Rising Talent”.

After sending more than 60 profiles to their support team and sharing some of the communication I’ve had with the developer, Upwork finally sent the following:

“We have strong evidence that these freelancers were engaged in fraudulent activity on our platform and that they are part of a group that often participates in non-delivery of work.”

Despite that statement, most of the 60+ developers I sent are still available for hire today on the site.

I post this as a public service, nothing more. I’ve had great experiences with Upwork and Odesk developers in the past. But the level of fraud that I was able to discover on my own, and the fact that Upwork is not aggressively disabling these fake accounts should give anyone pause when either hiring or looking for work on Upwork.