Someone is pretending to be me

......

I'm not sure how this actually pans out if it works. Can you really refuse to use video for the entire contract of the job? How do you get paid if you need to submit tax documents? Do you pretend to be me forever?"

Having over 15 years working as freelancer through Upwork I can answer that.

1 - Can you really refuse to use video for the entire contract of the job? Yes, you can. But only if you're good at your job. 90% of my clients never knew my real face. I only did video calls with the other 10% of them while we were already deep in the project(s) and trust was already well established. I do prefer voice over written chat though so I have weekly calls with all of them.

2 - How do you get paid if you need to submit tax documents? Upwork is great in that perspective. They have a lot of FAQ helping you with all tax informations and if that fails you have live chat too, with support. However, in this case, being the fact it was an impostor, Upwork style of getting paid and filing for taxes are 2 different beasts they frankesteined together. You still get paid under the fake name using your desired method of payment and filing taxes under your real name, which is done outside of Upwork's control.

3 - Do you pretend to be me forever? Not necessarily actually. You can do bait&switch. Bait clients, do good work for them, create a great relationship with them. Then either you create a new profile under real you and move projects there or move them outside Upwork forever. The fake identity sham is only there to help land the clients in the first place. Once you hook them and they depend on you, they really don't care about Upwork's protection and all that, they just want work to be done.

Is this going to be a new problem that the gov is not equipped to deal with? Are we going to need to be on high alert that one day the IRS is going to alert me that my tax bracket is 37% because of my income from the 6 jobs I'm working? Then it will take months or years of legal battles to "prove" I didn't actually work 6 full time jobs this year.

They had gotten someone else from the India office to conduct the interview. He said his camera wasn't working and we didn't think anything of it.

He aced the interview, even made good recommendations on the project he would be running.

The guy that showed up wasn't even at a junior level. It became painfully obvious after a couple of days. Pure red flags but the highlight...

- When asking for a project plan on an enterprise level project his response was "I can code all this in 3 days".

- Proceeds to supply broken code.

- When mentioned the code doesn't work he gets aggressive and says other people on the team broke it.

- Code gets reviewed by a senior architect (Bob) from another team. Turns out code was copied from an external github. So even if it worked it would be illegal to use.

- They get aggressive saying that Bob is jealous.

- Bob proceeds to document in detail the codes origin, legal details and points out where the code is broken.

- Bob and senior management have a meeting with the guy, where he is asked supply his original code (which he can't). Is then asked to explain exactly what the code does.

- Bob puts the cherry on the cake where he finds a simple broken function that anyone junior developer could see is wrong. Asks him to explain what is wrong with that code.

After that the guy got fired. Not sure if they investigated further in the India branch. But it was embarrassing all round.

I'm still not sure how the imposter planned to keep the job after getting it. I suspect the stand-in expected money and didn't get it. So didn't support them.