It was the first quarter of the year 2022 when things blew up on Upwork. Masses of scam job posts, loads of requests for removing them from the platform, and a lot of work for every freelancer to flag them as inappropriate. And, of course, lots of work for the platform to handle all of the above!
Are there a lot of scams on Upwork? Are all jobs on Upwork legit? Is Upwork safe to do business on? How to avoid scams on Upwork and other sites like Fiverr?
Many new freelancers must be wondering if Upwork is real or fake. Are all jobs on Upwork legit? And looking at the scale of things in 2022, these questions are valid.
Just to be clear, I’m not blaming anyone here. The platform did what it could in the present situation, some freelancers used a lot of their time (and patience!) in flagging the scam jobs… but I do blame the scammers! It’s all their fault. Cheating freelancers and freelance platforms is probably one of the lowest forms of crime in my books, so I cannot feel more sorry for the freelancers who fell for the scams or for Upwork for the work hours lost because of them.
Upwork Scams 2022: What was the fuss all about?
Scams are nothing new and every freelance site suffers from them. Some of the obvious ones are something that is technically not a scam in terms of how the platform’s interfaces might work, but they are moral scams and unacceptable nonetheless.
And then, some are complete frauds where criminals make money. This is a nasty business.
And it’s not just Upwork, this stuff happens on every freelance site. There’s always some loophole, social engineering approach, fake identity, or something, that the scammers can try to employ to lure in innocent and unsuspecting freelancers.
At the beginning of 2022, all of a sudden, my favorite freelance platform was filled with:
- Complete scam clients who approached freelancers outside the platform
- Job posts that included contact information
- Full websites created for phishing passwords of freelancers
See what I mean? As I’ve been rarely looking at my job feed for the past several years, my online LinkedIn buddies, fellow freelancers, helped me to demonstrate the multitude of these scams. Here is the tip of the iceberg.
It’s like the slogan we all have learned because of the lockdowns, social distancing, and all other precautions because of COVID-19: STAY SAFE!
(My own experiences are described here: How I Avoided Getting Scammed on a Freelance Site. It’s a funny story because I dodged the same scam client intuitively – twice, even when I had forgotten the first incident!)
For your convenience, the rules of thumbs are marked with underlined bold decoration. Be sure to know these typical scams by heart so that you don’t need to go into a personal lockdown and quit working on freelance sites!
Paying outside the freelance site
One of the most typical scams involves the client trying to initiate contact on a freelance site but then going outside the platform by providing alternative contact information, making a bilateral deal, and promising to pay the freelancer directly via bank transfer, PayPal, Stripe, Payoneer, etc. Of course, when the job is completed, the client vanishes. Typically, you won’t be even able to trace them back online because they assumed some innocent person’s identity.
José Alberto Justiniani, a Spanish to English and English to Spanish translator, demonstrates in this video how scammers post jobs with contact information in them to lure freelancers to work outside the platform.
Scammers sharing their contact information in multiple job posts. [Courtesy of José Alberto Justiniani]
In this case, most freelance sites cannot do anything to help the freelancer as indeed it is done outside the platform. Freelancers must insist on going by the book in these cases. Stay within the platform, and obey the rules and the Terms of Service.
B2B lead generation and data entry specialist Rabia Rahim demonstrated one of these kinds of Fiverr scams.
The most trivial scam is trying to make a deal outside the freelance platform.
When this phenomenon started, I posted about this on LinkedIn. The post got over a hundred comments which tell something about the magnitude of the issue. (Thank you Shamila Iyer for digging this up!)
Shamila’s quick look in the peak weeks of the Upwork scams 2022: 12 out of 15 job posts seemed dubious at that instant. This is crazy!
In some cases, it is technically not a big scam as such if the client and the freelancer agree to go outside the platform together. They both violate the platform’s ToS, though, together, and therefore deliberately accept the risk of getting banned. In those cases, it is a good chance of never getting paid by the client as “opportunity makes a thief”, so to say.
The client misuses the freelancer’s trust, and when there is no escrow in place, takes the results and runs away. From the perspective of business ethics, this is completely wrong, of course. These types of clients typically target new freelancers who they suspect to not yet know all the rules.
This happened to Christopher Denais when he was starting up and trusting one of his first clients.
One of Christopher’s first clients used the opportunity of not paying him by luring him to work outside the platform.
The solution against these scammers is the same as above. Go by the book without any deviations and don’t take the discussion off the platform before the contract has started. And learn how to use the escrow system properly from the start.
Interestingly, there are even job posts for creating new Upwork client accounts to run these scams as virtual assistant Judy Ann Bantilan found out. Her LinkedIn post shows how someone was trying to recruit her to create 5 new Upwork accounts and post 3 projects from each of them. That would be a total of 15 scam job posts!
The invitation for creating fake Upwork accounts that Judy received. [Courtesy of Judy Ann Bantilan]
Obviously, anyone asking you to create profiles doesn’t have intentions that would survive daylight.
Chargebacks
Another popular plot that keeps repeating is a chargeback. Banks can reverse a purchase made in certain dispute situations. Investopedia gives a good description of how chargebacks work. What happens is:
- “A chargeback is the payment amount that is returned to a debit or credit card, after a customer disputes the transaction or simply returns the purchased item.”
- “The chargeback process can be initiated by either the merchant or the cardholder’s issuing bank.”
- “Merchants typically incur a fee from the card issuer when a chargeback occurs.”
Abid Mahmud, a senior graphic designer, did a great job but the client did a chargeback via their bank, leaving Upwork with no cash to be transferred to Abid. This is one of those cases that are hard to cope with for the freelancer as well as for the platform. See the discussion on the Community Forum for reference. Nasty business, pure evil stuff!
Abid faced a chargeback and never saw the money. A 100% scam client.
With chargebacks, any freelance site cannot do much at all. The only way is to try to screen your clients as best as you can. My approach to staying safe is described in detail here: How to Get Clients on Upwork With Proven Screening Methods.
Stolen credit cards
Saad Ullah Butt, a crypto and blockchain content creator, met with a client that seemed perfectly fine at first, but the scam was revealed when the payment could not be released. The client used a stolen credit card which was canceled by its true owner.
Saad has developed a sixth sense for spotting scammers after one stolen credit card scam.
This is a very similar scam compared to the chargebacks. The client can appear genuine and the issue only arises once the payment is to be released.
The only way to protect yourself against this scam is to do a small project first to test the ice. As the scammer’s intention clearly is to avoid paying altogether, you would get the issue only in a small project, not a big and significant one, that wouldn’t interfere with your main business. This can be done for instance by requesting a small milestone that is paid to the escrow and released to you before proceeding with the main chunk of work.
Politely force the client to do a full roundtrip of the project from discussing the requirements to making the payment before starting a big project.
Asking for a refund
A popular claim many scam clients make is that “I don’t like the work” or that the freelancer did a completely wrong thing than what they requested.
This is also a scam as the intention of the client is to avoid paying altogether. Regardless of how good or bad the result the freelancer delivers is, it must be paid for according to the freelance site’s rules. After assessing the delivery, the client can deem it worth the money or not worth the money and reflect that on the review. It is not OK to ask for refunds once the work has been done!
Shameem Reza, a mobile app developer, experienced some Fiverr scams and quit soon after. Understandably, it was a big disappointment. Then he moved on and joined Upwork which worked out much better for him. Victory!
Shameem changed platforms because he felt the refund policy favored his client too much. Now, he’s totally crushing it on Upwork!
Most freelance sites have some sort of mechanism for handling disputes: The client says he didn’t get the work done but the freelancer is convinced that everything was done properly. In some cases, the client is malicious and only aims to take advantage of the dispute mechanism.
The best way to protect yourself against refunds is to know how the platform’s dispute mechanism works. For instance, here is the description of disputes on Upwork (absolutely worth reading, by the way). And here is the only thing I found regarding disputes on Fiverr with a quick look. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any official guidelines, but I did find loads of reports of Fiverr scams.
Requesting free samples
Some scammers trick the freelancer into sending additional, client-specific samples, before engaging in a “big project”. This is to lure the freelancer into doing something relatively small and send it over without making it an official and paid milestone of work.
Once the unsuspecting freelancer has sent the sample, the client vanishes in thin air.
The sample was the job!
Shafi Mushtaq, a video editor/producer, learned it from one incident. He’ll never send samples again!
Shafi was tricked to sent samples once. And he took it as a positive learning experience! What a great attitude!
This is perhaps the most common scam there is. As long as the freelance site offers a chance of messaging and discussing the project back and forth, asking for “samples” is technically trivial. The scammer doesn’t even need any skills to do it!
Fortunately, there is a simple counter-method: Don’t send client-specific samples! Instead, point the client to similar work you have already done. Or just highlight that they are available in your portfolio.
Every freelancer learns how to avoid these scams from a single experience. Live and learn!
The scope creep trap: The classic case
Scope creep is the situation where the project never ends, the freelancer keeps getting more work or revisions to do, and the payment never arrives because the client claims the work is not finished. Even if the client pays for the original work, he gets much more work done for free. This is a scam too!
E-commerce copywriting expert Jawad Ali says he had an incident when starting up that led to the classic scope creep. He did get paid a small amount but had to stretch his scope multiple times over to get the client to close the project. From a moral perspective, this is deception, to say the least.
Pushing the freelancer into a never-ending scope creep is one of the classic moves that bug freelancers every year.
The key to avoiding scope creep is to put clear borders on the job. Do normal project scoping and management, and then, expectation management. Detailed tips for not getting into the scope creep are available here: How to Avoid Scope Creep as a Freelancer: 3 Tips from a Pro.
The scope creep trap: Scare tactics
Another classic scope creep-related scam is to attempt to scare the freelancer even after a long period of time since the completion of the project, to squeeze more results from the freelancer, to claim some or all of the money back, or even to get the freelancer to cover some fabricated damages to the client’s business. As if the client owned the freelancer!
Something is seriously wrong in the minds of these kinds of people. Really malicious stuff. For the record: Freelancers are supposed to be free!
The story of Kerry White, a digital content manager & content writer, is of this type. Her client tried to trick her into a really bad deal first, and upon rejection, started using dubious extortion techniques.
Kerry’s project took a surprising negative turn after a year. But she just said ‘no’.
The best way to avoid these kinds of scams is to say a firm ‘no’ just like Kerry did. Alternatively, don’t respond at all.
Afraid of getting sued? Not gonna happen. Suing freelancers is usually too expensive for the client so a lawsuit is nothing but an empty threat! Suing freelancers in other countries than the client’s country is even more unlikely to happen.
Actually, I don’t even know a single freelancer who has been taken to court. And my freelancer network counts in thousands. You’re safe 99.9% of the time. (I don’t have actual data on this, but this is how it seems to be.)
The scope creep trap: Cancellation after many revisions
The last variant of the scope creep scam is when the client stretches the project with numerous excuses in an attempt to crush the freelancer’s confidence. Then, tries to cancel the project without paying anything even after the freelancer has made several deliveries exactly as requested!
That makes it a scam. A genuine, honest client with proper business ethics would offer to pay for the part that was done properly. That’s the way we do business. Work done, work paid for. If all of the work was not done adequately, only the poorly executed part should be disputed by the client, not the whole project.
Wasif Dilawar, a graphic designer & e-commerce developer, is very familiar with these types of clients on Fiverr. Too familiar.
Wasif has put some effort into learning how to deal with these types of scope creep situations. He didn’t quit but kept going!
These cases are borderline scams. It may be hard to know if the client is a scammer or just being difficult.
The part that is definitely a scam is when the client refuses to pay anything at all. This is why a good way to avoid a complete conflict is to settle the amount to be paid by the client somehow if you suspect that the client is not completely malicious.
With truly malicious clients, true scammers, go for a dispute if you’re sure you have evidence of the work done and you’ve done everything correctly according to the platform’s Terms of Service. If the scam clients’ only weapon is bullying, tiring, and killing your confidence, you might have a chance to win and get paid at least partially. These are not the smartest scammers… they might just be people in a bad business position desperate to save some dollars.
Ghosting
Well, all freelancers know what ghosting means. The client just vanishes. Promised payments too.
This happened to Vishal Zanzrukia’s Top Rated Plus agency. He has spent over 10,000 hours working on the platform and pretty much knows how these things work. Yet, even the most experienced freelancer may find himself in a situation where the client just vanishes without a trace.
Vishal’s freelancer team was paid by him, but his agency had to absorb the loss when the client ghosted them.
Sometimes, clients who ghost you may not be scammers. Sometimes there’s just some communication mixup, change of priorities, accidents, bankruptcy, or something, that makes the client drop a project just like that.
And then, some are planned scams. This is typical in a project where the start goes well and the freelancer is lured into starting some work without a funded milestone. Then, after some results have been sent to the client, the client stops responding. Basically, the client gets part of the work done for free even though early parts of the project were paid.
The best insurance against these kinds of scammers is to always use the escrow system correctly: The work starts only when the next milestone is funded in full. And if this everything was done correctly otherwise, the client might deliberately reduce the balance on his credit card to make payment requests fail. In those cases, going into a dispute would be justified.
Other typical schemes
There are more scams than I could demonstrate in one article, but these are typical cases that repeat from time to time:
- The client asks you to buy something for the project so that you can do the project, but then the project never starts. The scammer just wanted to make some sales by deception.
- You get an email that appears to come from a freelance site (but it doesn’t come from the correct domain) asking you to reset your password with some excuse. This is just a bad phishing attempt.
- You get an email about a lawsuit that an unnamed client of yours is launching. The email tells you to pay some kind of legal fee to a bank account to avoid going to court.
- You get asked to create a new account on some other site first and provide the login information. This too is just a bad phishing attempt as the scammers attempt to use those credentials on other sites assuming that lazy people use the same credentials everywhere.
There are so many scams on all sites where the money goes around and freelance sites are no exception.
The frustration of honest freelancers
All of this has obviously led to high levels of frustration for many freelancers. Here are some examples of the general sentiment. (And please forgive me, I did not have the heart to go see the Community Forum as I could imagine what it would be like over there.)
Anna Baehr, an experienced English-Spanish-English translator, takes more and more precautions to stay away from scammers. She reported having spotted and taken screenshots of 30 scam job posts.
Stay away from the scammers, that’s your best insurance. Follow Anna’s advice!
Sometimes, a scam can end people’s careers on freelance sites. What Nadir Ul Kaysar, a virtual assistant & internet marketer, told is that after years of working on Upwork and its predecessors, he saw it better to quit. And nobody can blame him.
Nadir had a quick and efficient resolution to the issue: He quit Upwork.
Interestingly, it’s not only those freelancers working on freelance sites who suffer from the impact of all these scams. Some of them don’t even want to join any of the sites because of the fear of getting scammed on Upwork. For instance, freelance writer Kanishka Gopal chose to stay away from all of that, and who could blame her? It’s a safe choice!
Kanishka chose to avoid the whole issue by not joining any freelance site at all.
Sometimes, building a freelance business from scratch without joining any freelance site can be a good move in general.
Upwork scams 2022: The most elaborate scams
OK, I guess the above gave a pretty good overview of the typical scams and how they can be avoided. What was new to me this year and to many others was this: Some scammers build entire websites to create an illusion of Upwork hiring freelancers legitimately outside the platform!
Here’s the description from an anonymous source who prefers to remain safe by removing all identifying information from the story.
First, the freelancer was contacted on LinkedIn by someone who appears to work for Upwork.
First, you would get contact via a fake LinkedIn account.
Second, you get to a page that looks like Upwork with a link for applying for a job.
Then a job page.
The application link takes you to a subsite of iCIMS which itself is a legit site. But the subsite isn’t although it looks like Upwork.
Enter your email page.
Once you enter your email and submit it to the subsite, things start to look weird. You get a notification about creating a new password from a source that appears to be Upwork Inc. Recruit Portal!
Upon submitting your email, you get a request to change passwords on a fake site.
At this point, it is clear: These scammers set up a website within iCIMS that poses as Upwork, and uses its publicly available address, for the sole purpose of phishing freelancers’ passwords! We can assume that upon creating a new password, the freelancer would be approached by email that tells her to pay something to an anonymous account, send cryptocurrencies, or something, as ransom in order to recover the control of the Upwork account.
OK, so if scams are everywhere, what can I do?
Unless the freelance platforms, Upwork and Fiverr included, start screening and verifying all their clients, there is little else than this what an individual freelancer could and should do:
- Learn how to spot the scams to stay away from them (remember all of the above examples!)
- Flag them as suspicious so no other freelancer falls for the same scam
- Improve your process of screening clients fast so that you don’t spend much time dealing with scammers
- Maintain a healthy amount of paranoia (a deal that sounds too good to be real probably is)
- Never share any usernames, passwords, credit card information, etc. with anyone
- Never make any payments, it’s the freelancer who should get paid
- Avoid clients with no prior hiring history and unverified payment methods (which is not always a red flag but definitely safer for new freelancers)
- Additionally, increase the awareness of this issue (just like what I intended to do with this article)
At the time of writing this, I just celebrated the 7th anniversary of my first client on Elance (now Upwork). I still haven’t got scammed. But I’ve met several. The freelancers I’ve been helping have met many. My hires on Fiverr, Upwork, Guru, and other platforms have reported seeing suspicious job posts, direct messages, and so on.
I guess the bottom line is this: Stay suspicious and maintain that healthy paranoia while being open to true business opportunities. Don’t jump into every deal that comes your way.
Bonus scam: Email from cloud.upwork.com!
Wait, there is more!
Just to demonstrate what that healthy paranoia means in practice, I share a screenshot of one of the strangest emails I have ever gotten from the upwork.com domain. (I got the email in May 2021.)
Strange direct email from someone who appears to be working for Upwork.
The sender seems legit and the email comes from Upwork’s subdomain, cloud.upwork.com. What makes it strange is:
- There is no Upwork job post or any link to upwork.com at all
- The email is not formatted like normal invitations from Upwork
- The sender asks for the LinkedIn profile and a resume directly (Upwork’s freelancer profile pages have all this information!)
- The job has nothing to do with my expertise (although sometimes the keyword ‘Japanese’ leads to misunderstandings if not reading my profile)
- The email is sent to the sender with BCC to me which indicates a badly implemented mailing list of some sort
It led me to believe that either there are people within the organization who pull their own strings off-platform by brokering projects “under the table”, or someone has hacked an Upwork employee’s email account to send these kinds of emails. Fortunately, Upwork was quick to react and I haven’t heard of a similar incident ever since.
So, can I trust Upwork website? Yes, if I am careful enough and don’t let my guard down.
Anything out of the ordinary could be a scam, so keep your eyes open and stay safe!
