All freelance sites suffer from fake jobs and scammers as there is no way to guarantee that every job post leads to hiring someone. Are there fake jobs on Upwork too? Of course, there are. I’d also claim that Upwork has a specific issue with it. Instead of fighting scammers with all they have, they decided to write a guide for freelancers showing how to identify fake jobs on Upwork.
That tells us something, huh? While being definitely useful, the guide leaves out concrete examples probably because it would make the platform look too bad. So, here’s my version of how you can spot all those fake jobs that probably won’t lead to anyone being hired in 5 simple rules of thumb.
1. Repeated job posts
This is the most common thing and somewhat easy to notice. The exact same text appears in many job posts. Sometimes the client behind it seems legit, but still, considering a job that is posted multiple times on the same platform is not a smart move.
The same job appears 3 times in the search results. No hires, obviously.
So, the obvious thing to do is to search for the title of the job using the job search function. If you find multiple hits and the job descriptions look identical, you can be sure to skip sending a proposal to any of them.
2. Completely ridiculous budget
This is also far too common an issue. The client has a ridiculous budget mentioned upfront. You’d be working for a fraction of a peanut, so better skip considering these kinds of jobs.
With 21 work days in a month, the hourly rate would be less than $0.24 for this job. Skip!
3. Completely ridiculous job scope
Sometimes it is not the budget but the whole job scope that is too ridiculous to be considered. Stay away from all these idiotic jobs some people decided to post on Upwork. There’s nothing but trouble ahead with these guys even if they paid you in reality.
Is this guy asking you to sit in school in his stead or what?
Sometimes you can deduce a job being genuine but the presentation is so poor that you might want to run away from the opportunity. I suppose this is a job for someone to delete a comment on a social media platform or something, but it is all those emojis that make it look not serious.
Looks like a very serious job post…
4. Jobs posted by freelancers
This issue is perhaps the funniest one. Many freelancers post jobs to advertise their services. How exactly do they think this would work? Mostly, they just get banned from Upwork for good. So, anything that looks like an ad for freelance services is probably not worth even reading through.
A typical bad ad of someone’s freelance service.
Sometimes, it seems that the concepts of job posts and freelancer profiles are not clear to some newbies.
An attempt to understand how Upwork works is not a legit job.
Sometimes, there’s a bit more elaborate story behind the advertisement. But they never work either.
Let’s get this guy his birthday present!
5. Job posts with contact info in them
Sometimes people don’t think about anything else than their problem which needs a quick solution. Such things as Terms of Service (TOS) don’t matter at all. Many of them don’t realize adding your contact information in a job post gets you banned from the platform.
A classic mistake is to include contact information in the job post. This is not allowed on Upwork.
6. Dubious job scope
Sometimes, it is the job scope itself that screams “nothing to see here” with a see-no-evil-monkey emoji in it. Here’s an example of someone trying to cheat in e-sports, apparently. Would a cheater not cheat the freelancer too besides his enemies in the game? Want to try your luck?
A cheater is cheating.
Please note that at least 5 freelancers wanted to do this project!
7. Love is in the air
Many job posts describe romance-related “jobs” that are nowhere near legit! Typically, a man is seeking a woman promising all kinds of things as “payment”. I remember suggesting setting up a specific subdomain for these “job” posts, for example, match.upwork.com where all these love seekers could go and make a match of their lives!
All true Americans mix up “merry” and “marry”, right? Legit as hell!
8. Ridiculous number of invitations
One of the most obvious red flags on Upwork is a large number of invitations. And by large I mean huge! Generally, I discard all jobs where the number of invitations reaches a 2-digit figure. Sometimes, it can reach thousands which makes you wonder who bothers to do all the clicking in the first place!
Too many invitations are the biggest red flag.
Don’t waste a second on jobs that have over 10 invitations.
9. Equity-based compensation
Many startups are seeking top talents on Upwork. Unfortunately, many of them don’t have any funding yet, so they try to lure freelancers to work to earn shares of the company. That company will be so valuable in the future that even 1% of the share now will translate to millions of dollars later. Because the business idea is so good, it won’t even take more than 2-3 years!
Or so they hope. You can only hire freelancers on Upwork for money. Equity is not allowed. This is a TOS violation that might get you and the client banned from the platform.
Equity-based compensation is not allowed on Upwork.
10. Jobs called fake jobs
Yes, it is a thing! I’m guessing some freelancers have gotten so frustrated with fake Upwork jobs that they started testing the platform on their own to see if the obvious fake job which is titled “fake job” would be removed or not.
This fake job is fake. Obviously.
11. Money laundering
I saved the worst for the last. There are plenty of people who have figured out schemes for laundering dirty money by filtering it through Upwork. This can be a cryptocurrency scam, a Ponzi scheme of sorts, or simply something else where the client promises easy work or no work at all for creating some kind of automatic income stream.
Earn interest by not doing much – yet another day in freelancer paradise, yes?
This is straight-out criminal stuff! Stay away from these no matter what.
Are there fake jobs on Upwork? The platform’s own red flags
But hey, there is more. As mentioned in Upwork’s own guide, you should also avoid job posts that contain some of these obvious red flags:
- The job is vague or lacks adequate details
- The number of interviews is too many
- The payment method is unverified
- The hiring rate is 0% or very low
- The opportunity looks too perfect
- There are fake reviews in the client’s hiring history
- The identity of the client (person or company) is fake
That makes another seven red flags on our list. Now, with a total of 18 red flags, you’re fully equipped with a complete checklist and know how to identify fake jobs on Upwork.
What can we do when we see red flags on Upwork?
There’s only one thing to do when you encounter a job post that doesn’t look legit: Report it.
On every job post, Upwork has a link named Flag as inappropriate, and clicking on that link, selecting the suitable reason, and clicking on Submit is what you should do.
How to report jobs that are not legit.
Just report every bad job post and do a favor for every other freelancer. Upwork is fairly quick at removing jobs that are not legit.
But this is not all you need to know! Now, after being able to filter out all the red flags, you also must make sure to detect all the typical scams once you engage in an initial conversation with clients. That’s the next step. And then there are all the other steps…
If getting started on Upwork feels overwhelming, feel free to join my master class Freelance Like a Boss which gives you a complete walkthrough of the platform with exercises such as profile creation that I review personally. For the cost of peanuts, you get a chance to go straight for coconuts! It’s the most efficient way to get things going on Upwork.
