Someone stole my identity on Upwork and all I got was this lousy blog post
medium.com
medium.com
If I understand correctly Upwork is the same team that run Elance? If that's the case it won't work well for developers, stories like this don't surprise me.
I would certainly not use them in the future.
I wrote about why I created my marketplace here: https://medium.com/@laurenholliday_/10-reasons-i-created-my-...
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1. The author is a freelance writer and does not have any relationship to Upwork. I'll call her Author.
2. Someone has been doing freelance work via Upwork, claiming to be the author. That person apparently has been scamming at least some people who have hired him via Upwork. I'll call this guy Scammer.
3. Someone who was scammed by Scammer to the tune of $2000 wants his money back, and is going after Author because he thinks Author is Scammer. I'll call this guy Mark.
Assuming I've got this right, some things are unclear to me. For instance, has anyone told Mark that Author is not Scammer?
Author seems to be mostly trying to get Upwork to deal with the problem, and Upwork is trying to dodge responsibility so I doubt they are going to notify Mark that Scammer was an identity thief and that they have no idea who Mark should be going after.
(Upwork almost certainly very much wants to avoid doing anything that might make labor regulators in any jurisdiction that they may be subject to think that Upwork is actually an employer of the so-called freelancers rather than just a provider of a marketplace for freelances and those who need freelancers to hook up).
Looking over all this, it occurs to me that it might be a good idea in general for people to maintain a list online of places where they have accounts that are visible to the public, with a disclaimer that any public accounts purporting to be them not listed should be treated as fake. Put this list on your website and/or main social media so that it is easily found by anyone searching on your name or the name of any of your public accounts. (If you do not want to make it easy to correlate your accounts at different places, limit this to accounts that are already easily traceable back to your real identity).
However, as time progressed they started changing a bunch of site features and it slowly started deteriorating from there. It became less and less useful for me. Once they merged with Elance and became Upwork, it became unpleasant to use so I just quit the site altogether.
In short, Upwork was great at one point then they tried to do too much with it resulting in not-so-great service.
$ whois michellenickolaisenfraud.com
Domain Name: MICHELLENICKOLAISENFRAUD.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2048980654_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.enom.com
Registrar URL: www.enom.com
Updated Date: 2016-08-03T10:06:56.00Z
Creation Date: 2016-08-03T17:06:00.00Z
Registrar IANA ID: 48
Reseller: NAMECHEAP.COM
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
Registrant Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
Registrant Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
Registrant City: PANAMA
Registrant State/Province: PANAMA
Expiration Date: 03-aug-20171) The author doesn't actually have an Upwork account at all, right? I can see why Upwork would be slow in talking to her in that case, since she's not even a customer/user and is "attacking" a customer/user. EDIT: I meant that it wasn't clear to me whether she was a user or not for most of the article. For some reason I went in assuming she was.
2) She never tries to reach out to the insane guy directly? She just goes straight to Upwork? EDIT: clearly, this is not unreasonable, although talking to the nutcase may potentially have been faster.
3) Her plan was to sit quietly and hope Upwork made the problem go away for her? EDIT: apparently she made "a ruckus on Twitter" which I did read and then forgot about.
That said, this sounds pretty awful and hard to defend against.
EDIT: apparently this came off as being more against the author than I intended.
This person in question has already shown that they are willing to steal someone's identity. This isn't some small misunderstanding that can easily be solved by contacting a reasonable person and sorting it out.
2) Why wouldn't she try to approach the cause of the situation rather than the clearly unstable symptom? The guy is very clearly unhinged and is throwing around threats left and right, it doesn't seem wise to poke that hornet's nest.
3) Her plan was to take steps to make sure the situation got cleared up without escalating the situation and in a way where she's cooporating with Upwork.
Not sure why you're so ready to jump on her back over what seem to be quite reasonable actions against a very unreasonable attacker.
#2 - You probably said it best yourself: "reach out to the insane guy directly" ... I can't comment on whether she did or not, but it's usually best to not interact with people who are threatening you.
#3 - I'd say it was anything but quiet. She raised the issue on social media and with Upwork, which were her immediate means of remediation.
And I'm still not 100% sure if that's the correct interpretation, whether she was attacked by someone that impersonated her, or an Upwork customer that was really scammed by the impersonator.
I think the problem is that there are no better alternatives to it that fills the same space. Yes, you can market yourself by writing blogs, etc but Upwork definitely helps in getting clients and leads.
I've been thinking maybe I can create something similar but try to address some of the problems now that Upwork is getting this much flak. Obviously it will be a much smaller, limited platform. But does anyone have any suggestions of what they would like to see? Something that could go in the MVP.
Take it from me, your client would rather have you take responsibility, and also do whatever it takes to make it right for them.
This appears to be a trend, where tech companies don't take Client Support seriously.... Ex. That programming streaming site.... don't be like them... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487708
I went to the support. They said they can't prove he copied my description and he's legit overall. So their verification system is a disaster.
Does such case even fall under the "stolen identity" umbrella?
The site seems to attract these sorts of employers and I don't have the time or energy to wade through the garbage. It's like a global sweatshop for software developers.
Meanwhile, Michelle should get a lawyer to help her get control of the Upwork account, and to stop David's libelous posts.