The Upwork problem: fake Chinese developer's accounts located in Serbia…
I’ll tell you the story of a repeating pattern in my hunting for developers on Upwork and LinkedIn. Be aware of this recurrent scam.
code.store is growing like hell and, like everybody else, we look for talented developers almost everywhere. I even recruited one guy in a bar at 2 AM drunk as hell. But on a daily basis, we mostly focus on LinkedIn and Upwork to find talents. For a few months, we experience the same scam on both platforms.
We start looking for NodeJS/ReactJS full-stack profiles on Upwork and see this kind of guy:
At first, everything seems just perfect. A guy with solid experience, and reviews, we invite him for an interview. Another way for scammers is to contact you directly on LinkedIn with a perfect profile:
We organize a video interview with each guy, and we have the exact same conversation:
— Hi Bohdan, could you turn your camera on?
— Oh, sorry, my network is so bad here (says with a strongly Chinese / Indian accent)
— Ok, no problem, you said in your profile you speak Serbian (or Russian, or Ukranian or Polish, depending of the guy)
At this moment, usually, they mute themselves, pretending to have network/mic issues.
What does it mean?
It’s a kind of praise for eastern European developers, who are like luxury French brands, copied by Chinese and Indians.
It was not wrong, for code.store, to hunt and recruit the best developers from over 20 Eastern European countries for the most prestigious clients. We’ve been saying it for years, this is the best IT talent pool in the world.
It also says a lot about the Upwork problem of screening their profiles. We’ve been working with Upwork for almost 15 years, with ODesk/E-lance first then Upwork. And we’re not alone, just check the following thread on their community forum : https://community.upwork.com/t5/Clients/Fake-Freelancers/td-p/505146
“My bigger concern is the rampant and OUT OF CONTROL issue of phony freelancer accounts. I recently tried to hire for a job and out of 5 interviews, all 5 were not in the country they claimed to be from. Some claimed to be in East Europe and others claimed to be in Canada or the United States. I voice verified with them and they were all Chinese. I have been reporting this issue for years, yet Upwork seems to not want to do anything about it.” — Says a premium employer spending over 400K$ a year on Upwork.
And the only answer from Upwork is to remove (sic!) posts from the thread in the community forum:
“A few posts have been removed from this thread as they were in violation of Community Guidelines. I would like to clarify once again that we do take reports of ToS violations seriously. What we can’t allow is publicly discussing specific violations, specific violators and actions taken against their accounts. Not only because it’s against Community Guidelines but also because we want to protect the integrity of our processes for identifying fraudulent accounts.”
Despite the desire of the new CEO Hayden Brown to focus on Fortune 500 companies and the purge of more than 1.8 million accounts, the problem obviously remains.
And it’s easy to spot the problem, without even having access to the data. I spent some time on Upwork, searching for the total number of found ReactJS freelancers limiting the location to a country at a time. I then calculated the ratio between ReactJS Developers on Upwork and country’s population :
As you may immediately see on this chart, 3 countries: Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia have 4 to 5 times more developers than they should. We also have slightly higher numbers for Romania (which might be explained by a strong IT tradition for this small country) and Georgia (probably due to sanctions against bloody Russia, as many Russian developers flew from Putin’s nazis to this small neighborhood country).
If you guys, experienced same problem, please comment and share this post!
