The past few days I started getting interview invites from companies and people I had never heard of. I initially shrugged it off as aggressive spam, but after declining one of the invites, one of the emailers followed up to confirm that I was the same person that they were talking to on Upwork.
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.