Tell HN: Upwork has an impersonation problem

The freelancer had Work Diary enabled, which took screenshots of their screen as they worked and shared them with me as their client.

From the screenshots, I could identify other projects they worked on and other Upwork accounts they were using.

Yeah, I was thinking about this process as well (did it about 10 years ago now when it was still E-lance, I think... wow). I guess it wouldn't be that hard to fake your way through the process, maybe the level of effort is worth it for the amount they're ripping off?

I got burned by something like this.

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.

I'm looking for advice on a similar issue.

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?

One simple way would be require video submission where you have to speak your name and mention that you have joined upwork as a freelancer. But then upwork would have to spend more money on validations. They probably don't care as much.

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.