Last November, I was reeling from the sudden back-to-back disintegration of my two most recent employers. My lingering self-respect, along with a glance at the all-time low wages now being offered by the driving and delivery apps that once kept me afloat during the gaps in my freelance writing career, stopped me from revisiting those abusive relationships, but things were getting undeniably grim.
That’s when I recalled a potential life preserver mentioned by a fellow writer pal: Upwork, a freelancing platform that wisely rebranded from “Elance-oDesk” in 2015 with the subtly fatalistic slogan, “This is How We Work Now.” (You may have seen it in their recent commercial blitz.)
Over a catch-up coffee a year earlier, my buddy told me he’d found surprise success on Upwork. He spoke of well-paid, fun-sounding gigs he’d landed ghostwriting wedding speeches and wine mom group chat zingers. A glance at his profile page indicated that having worked a mere 85 hours, his lifetime earnings on the platform were already listed at “$10,000+.” That plus symbol was downright decadent. My friend assured me that, once I had a few initial Upwork jobs and their subsequent reviews under my belt to help establish my “Job Success Score” — the metric essential for being shown to potential employers by the site’s algorithm — I too could join him in this digital promised land.
Following that coffee, I created an Upwork account and poked around the site, but, all too familiar with the drawbacks of the gig economy and its inherently exploitative and labor law-skirting business model, I wasn’t going to be lulled into a false sense of security just yet.
It only took a year before I heard the wolves at my door. Sure, all gig work sucks, but at least this was a platform I could participate in from home. At least that’s what I said to psych myself up. Unfortunately, by the time I’d dusted off my pristine Upwork profile, I had all but forgotten the coda that capped off my buddy’s otherwise ringing endorsement. “But, seriously,” he’d said, the sudden absence of levity in his voice demanding my eyes meet his waiting pair. “You’ve really got to watch out for scammers there.”
How Upwork works
Landing jobs on Upwork happens through a bidding system. Clients post ads describing one-off projects or short-term work along with the budget they’ve allotted for it, which is paid out in return for time logged working or fixed-price lump sums upon completing the contract or reaching “milestones” reached or a completed contract. With these parameters in mind, applicants propose the hourly rate or flat fee they’d be willing to accept and wait to be selected.
Upwork invites anyone running low to re-up to the tune of $0.15 per Connect, which may seem like a negligible cost to individual freelancers, but has proven to be…wildly lucrative
A key difference between Upwork and other job boards (and a hint as to why it’s publicly traded, but Craigslist isn’t) is the fee structure. The platform takes a 10 percent standard “service fee” from all payments to freelancers. Upwork also collects a flat $4.95 contract initiation fee from the client for each new job as well as an additional 5 percent “client marketplace fee” added on to payments from the platform to freelancers.
Here’s an illustration: if a freelancer’s contracted for work that pays $1,000, the (theoretically honorable) client must pay a total of $1,054.95 ($1,000 payment + $50 client marketplace fee + $4.95 initiation fee) to Upwork, $1,000 of which is — this is very important for later — set aside in escrow. Once the contract ends, the $1,000 is remitted from escrow to the freelancer, but only after Upwork takes another 10 percent off the top (and an additional “VAT” off the $1,000 in some regions). The client pays $1,054.95, the freelancer makes $900 (or $880), and Upwork pockets $154.95.
This is but one of the systems Upwork uses to harvest revenue from its freelancers — the total number of whom is no longer a figure Upwork makes public, but the topic remains hotly debated in Upwork’s own forums, and those discussions often place the figure around 15-20 million active.
There’s also Connects, the platform’s proprietary premium currency, which job seekers must spend to even apply for work. Currently all new freelancers are granted 50 Connects upon joining the site and bank an allowance of 10 every month. Taking a cue from dating apps raking it in with similar digital products, Upwork offers freelancers the option to spend Connects to boost their profiles’ visibility and/or to pay a monthly $20 for a “Plus” account that multiplies the user’s per-billing-cycle Connect ration from 10 to 100. In past years, bids on jobs may have cost the freelancer around two to four Connects. Today, some cost upwards of 16. Few I’ve encountered let you submit for under 10. Upwork says, when determining how many Connects each job’s proposal should cost, they “consider a range of factors, including project size, scope, and market demand.”
Naturally, Upwork invites anyone running low to re-up to the tune of $0.15 per Connect.
Upwork shares no data on how many Connects the average freelancer has to spend per job landed, but the Upwork forums again overflow with users complaining about and questioning this ever-increasing cost of doing business that also seems to be yielding fewer results.
Initially, it seemed that setting up and forgetting about my profile the year before had been a stroke of good luck — my account had accrued a tidy Connect stockpile while dormant. I soon relearned how easy it is to blow through a token currency that’s been abstracted from its USD value. My quest for work that would help me be less broke had somehow only made me just as broke in an entirely new economy.
Finally getting a bite from a client… not knowing you’re the fish
On Nov. 29, with my Connect starter pack nearly drained after a few days of job searching and applying, one of my bids yielded a response.
The post I’d responded to was by someone named “Khuram D.” who was seeking a “creative writer for a short story.” I would be provided all necessary background information for said short story, which would run about 1,000 words and “cover a person’s career/life in a compelling and catchy way.” “Essentially,” the description continued, this would be a “‘featured profile’ of a person, written in a short story format.” I didn’t know why Khuram hadn’t just called it a profile, but I chalked that up as the reason he was hiring someone else to write for him.
I was not only about to land my first job, but it was shaping up to be a steady income stream.
I pored over Khuram’s linked company profile sidebar before applying (and checked it again after his response to my pitch arrived). This was a site allegedly full of scammers, after all. I assumed his linked company, “KD,” to just be his initials. But I saw no reason his seeming self-employment should prevent us from doing business together, especially as a one-man shop myself. Further bolstering the case for Khuram’s legitimacy were the raw figures on that company page, tabulated by Upwork itself. The data showed KD had paid out over $14,000 to 200+ freelancers over 120+ jobs he’d posted on Upwork since 2015. Upwork offered another stamp of assurance on the KD page, stating that my prospective client had a “payment method verified,” replete with a little green checkmark badge. Most impressive was that the 153 reviews from past clients left him with a 4.73/5 star rating. I couldn’t read those reviews myself, but their aggregated co-sign was enough to convince me this wasn’t some fly-by-night scammer.
Khuram’s opening salvo was to ask for relevant samples of my writing, which I provided. In this intro message, like others to come over the course of our correspondence, Khuram alternated between “I” and “we” when referring to himself. “Before I hire you…” was followed up a couple sentences later with “what we’re looking for.” At the time I made little of it. Maybe there were other people who’d be looking at my work, maybe it was someone putting on airs. And while such self-aggrandizement was worthy of my eye rolls, it didn’t reach the heights of “red flag.”
After reviewing my samples, Khuram flattered me, saying “the tone and style of this is very well written.” He added, “If we needed you to write these pieces on a regular pieces [sic] (3-5 per week), could you handle such a workload,” and inquired about what sort of bulk rate I might offer for the opportunity.
Just as my faith in the platform had begun to waver, I was not only about to land my first job, but it was shaping up to be a steady income stream. Maybe my friend was right about this being the land of milk and honey.
I would later learn that at least half a dozen other writers had already complained on and/or to Upwork about this guy ripping them off — information I was not allowed to see, and that Upwork seemingly had not acted on.
Early warning signs of an Upwork scammer
I suggested I start with the one profile Khuram had initially posted about at my originally proposed hourly rate so I could get a feel for the work’s flow and demands. We could figure out a bulk rate for future writing after that, presuming we wanted to continue working together.
Khuram seconded my idea and said that, since we didn’t yet know how many hours this would take, he’d “place a small deposit, and leave the budget open.” I should “just let [him] know the total time spent when [I’m] done.”
Khuram’s proposed invoicing process aligned with most of the past hourly writing work I’d done via email. We were keeping everything on platform, and we would be using the escrow system to process payments. Still, we were deviating from Upwork’s SOP of having a job’s entire budget placed in escrow up front, and I hadn’t completely forgotten my friend’s words, or the subreddit’s calls for vigilance. On the other hand, neither of us knew what an appropriate budget should look like just yet. And he’d been entirely candid about the meager size of the initial deposit.
All the same, my gut had its first genuine “off” feeling, and I wasn’t about to ignore it. After Khuram put $5 in the escrow pot and sent over documents about the subject, I asked him to affirm a few things in writing before I started any work.
“Am I correct in my understanding,” I asked him via Upwork’s in-house message service, “that your $5 in escrow is merely a ‘hold’ of sorts and, at the end of this trial assignment, I’ll report my hours to you when I turn it in [sic] the piece, whereafter you’ll honor my current proposed rate, regardless of whether or not we decide to move ahead with a bulk rate deal?”
“Yes, exactly, you described the deal accurately,” Khuram confirmed.
As my one business law class from college taught me (and double-checking with an attorney confirmed), our message exchange now constituted a bona fide contract.
But once I uploaded that rewrite on Dec. 12, my once prompt responder adopted a vow of silence.
In the coming days, I wrote a fluffy bio for personal injury attorney “James Specter.” The accompanying dossier told the tale of a man who’d had a deep desire to fight for the little guy instilled in him after a hit-and-run driver took out his father’s motorcycle, leaving the man paralyzed from the neck down, and facing a future full of suffering and misery.
That sinking feeling that your Upwork client has ghosted…
As I worked on the piece, I was surprised at the fun I was having writing something so far out of my usual wheelhouse. Throughout the process, Khuram was a paragon of professionalism. After I turned in my initial draft, he offered solid feedback along with a helpful outline for an arrangement of the story that was more to his liking.
I did what I assumed was the necessary due diligence of sending DMs into the void and began building my nest egg of case-making receipts.
But once I uploaded that rewrite on Dec. 12, my once prompt responder adopted a vow of silence. I frantically began looking all over the web for a lawyer named “James Specter” or any attorney matching the story beats that had been fed to me. My searches turned up nothing. Who had I just written about? And to what end? My heart sank as it dawned on me that my client had ghosted.
Still, I’m not one to roll over when wronged. Khuram could close whatever tabs he wanted. Our exchange was all there in writing on Upwork. And since the company had required a government ID when I’d signed up, they presumably had required the same of him.
I did what I assumed was the necessary due diligence of sending DMs into the void and began building my nest egg of case-making receipts. I asked Khuram if further edits were needed, to no reply, before sending my total hours and final invoice on the 18th. I even went so far as to create an additional Upwork milestone that requested the $475 he still owed me. Then, I had little choice but to sit on my hands until the new year.
On Jan. 1, Upwork sent me an email alert asking if I was “ready to get paid?” Khuram had logged back on to release the $5 from escrow and, now that Upwork had their two quarters, my $4.50 was ready to be transferred to my bank at my convenience. Rather than rush to claim my riches, I sent Khuram one final impotent message on the 3rd stating that he was leaving me no choice but to escalate.
Please, may I have a crumb of recourse?
I assumed a recounting of what had happened, along with the related chat logs, would be enough for Upwork to confirm they had a scammer on their hands and do what it took to resolve matters. Whether I’d be able to get Khuram to pay me outside of Upwork remained unclear, but at least I could ensure nobody else got burned by him. To my surprise, Upwork’s response to my spread of receipts and request for Khuram’s deplatforming was relatively nonchalant.
Mashable Light Speed
[Upwork’s] message did include another reminder that they weren’t going to be able to help me get that additional $475
After verbally patting my head about the deception and confirming what I already knew — that Upwork wouldn’t be covering what Khuram owed me or telling him to pay it — along with a helpful reminder to make sure everything gets into escrow next time, my first email response from Upwork Support did concede that my client had given me “misleading information.” They offered to try and reach out to Khuram on their end, making sure to qualify that this “nudge” did not guarantee a response.
I took them up on that offer. I also asked if, presuming Khuram remained unresponsive, they’d hand over his name and contact info so I could pursue recourse elsewhere. I closed my response looking for assurances that, given the evidence I’d presented, Upwork would be 86ing this obvious ne’er-do-well.
Upwork messaged me next from the Disputes and Mediation department, but there was no update on their attempts to contact Khuram or even an acknowledgment that some kind of effort was afoot. The message did include another reminder that they weren’t going to be able to help me get that additional $475, and, since my case wasn’t eligible for dispute assistance, they were afraid they’d be unable to assist me further.
I again asked for Khuram’s info, and Upwork’s acknowledgment that he’d indeed been a bad boy whom they planned on punishing.
Upwork’s next response refused to even dignify my assertion that Khuram violated site policy or that they could and should do something about it, only sharing that the Disputes and Mediation team couldn’t give out users’ personal information for (understandable) privacy reasons. But if I told them specifically what I was after, they could pass my request along to the appropriate channel.
I would later learn that at least half a dozen writers had already complained to Upwork about this guy ripping them off — information I was not allowed to see, and that Upwork seemingly had not acted on.
When all else fails, commiserate?
I stepped back from the affair to research which legal avenues I might use to get Khuram to honor our contract. I can only assume this was construed by Upwork as my acquiescence based on the survey email they sent asking for a satisfaction rating about the resolution of my now-closed support ticket.
‘Upwork responds well after the scam happened…but it seems to do nothing to vet or prevent them.’
During my holding pattern over the holidays, I’d first begun researching Upwork’s scamming issue and the company’s historic response to it. After my frustrating tussle with support, I redoubled my efforts. I was taken aback by the sheer number of those who had been burned like me. All around the web were stories from wronged Upwork users wondering if they should — and finding out they might actually be able to — sue the company for its role in the harm done to them by scammers or the platform itself.
I was able to get in touch with a few of them.
Ruben Miller from California has been hiring as a client on Upwork for 15 years and has experienced “everything under the sun” when it comes to the platform’s other cohort of scamming: “Freelancers disappearing, trying to add manual hours, using mouse wiggler apps to fake productivity, getting hired and giving [the work] to freelancers in other countries, faking identity (as far as fake AI video face changer apps on calls), fake accounts, and tons of AI applications without knowing how to do the job.”
Like other victims, Miller says that, after he reports an incident, “Upwork responds well after the scam happened…but it seems to do nothing to vet or prevent them.” He also laments what he perceives as a degradation of Upwork’s vetting and prevention processes that has resulted in scams “growing exponentially.”
“Used to be a few scam proposals per job now it’s 90%. It’s turning UpWork into a bottom barrel scam platform sadly,” he stated over our DM exchange. “Once they fired the majority of staff it got real bad and AI made it worse. It’s starting to make me think they make money off scam proposals, as it pushes the job auctions up.” He elaborated about his issues with the Connect-based bidding system, stating that “if scammers pay for proposals, that makes [Upwork] money as well. The proposal earnings is just a huge potential conflict of interest with what the site provides. Why root out scammers if you get paid per proposal?”
Raised in Manilla, Ralph Ngo thought he’d won big when he landed a job with Upwork that promised him $5 for every page of a middle school science textbook he converted into a multiple-choice question. The Philippines, like many English-speaking foreign nations where workers can be paid far less than their U.S. counterparts, is a natural fit for a place like Upwork. Philippines-based outsourcing firms advertise the labor on offer — for prices as low as $3.33 per hour — and Upwork’s Western “enterprise” clients get to shop at fire sale prices while Upwork merely hosts the connection.
‘Upon job completion, my anxiety was through the roof.’
Ralph told me over email that he spent 2 months converting 1-4 pages a day and “was expecting to get paid around $300-$500 for the massive amount of work that [he’d] put in,” a relative fortune for a 20-year-old still living in the Philippines at the time.
Ralph acknowledges he’d been less than vigilant about following the site’s terms of service and policing for scams, and agreed to the deal through a verbal agreement the client had offered on Skype after the client had invited him there to discuss the job.
“I had a growing anxiety in the last few weeks where I thought that they had no obligation to pay me as I did not accept any contract in Upwork,” lamented Ralph. “Upon job completion, my anxiety was through the roof… I blindly followed every instruction they gave me regarding payment, including to accept an Upwork contract for $5 for my work. When I asked why it was only $5, they said that it will be changed later to reflect my work and it’s only there temporarily.”
Ralph pleaded with his client for full payment, even making up a sick aunt as a last resort. Twisting the knife, the scammer told him that he’d been planning to offer Ralph a raise but was retracting the offer after such insulting insinuations of impropriety by Ralph.
Like me, Ralph ultimately only got a $5 payout. He says the experience left him “devastated” for two weeks. Unfortunately, his scammer was based in the UK, and the $200 he’d need to file a small claims case there was out of Ralph’s budget. Though he doesn’t hold Upwork entirely responsible for what happened to him, Ralph wonders why they haven’t done more to curb the “big scamming and quality control problem” that “runs rampant” on the site.
“Briefly looking through the front page of jobs, majority of them are unverified payments, low quality descriptions, asking for the impossible while paying 3rd world country wages or worse,” says Ralph. “It’s common knowledge that Upwork is a race to the bottom. It’s close to being not worth someone’s time.”
Like so many other victims, when Ralph complained publicly, a throng of vigilant Upwork loyalists materialized to criticize him. Though the site’s scamming issues are a well-documented blight, characters like Upwork power user Preston can be found in the replies of nearly every help, I’m new and think I’m getting scammed post on the Upwork forums, or on the subreddit, where they chide freelancers for their “user errors” and generally imply that they have no right to hold Upwork accountable for the literal crimes perpetrated against them in said company’s domain.
A scourge in plain sight
Some academic experts, like University of California, Hastings College of the Law, professor Veena Dubal, have gone on record suggesting that Upwork presenting its platform as a secure spot to conduct business could open the company up to some legal responsibilities when fraud occurs there. In a 2020 NBC News report on a previous Upwork scamming imbroglio, Dubal complained about the increasing normalization of contractors being scammed as if it were an assumed job risk.
‘[T]here’s a sense that the way to not have to deal with any kind of potential liability is just to not interfere at all.’
“There should be more of a sense of owing something to these workers,” Dubal said. “But instead there’s a sense that the way to not have to deal with any kind of potential liability is just to not interfere at all.”
Dubal, like many others in and outside of her field, regards the unregulated gig economy as a larger existential threat to freelancer security deserving more urgent attention than the alleged misdeeds of one company within it.
Still, I had a personal interest in Upwork. A company so dependent on user confidence in the security of their platform had to be doing more behind the scenes to proactively identify and ban fraudsters, I thought, digging into Upwork’s shareholder reports for evidence.
In its 2023 Annual Shareholder Report, Upwork cites their “trusted work marketplace” as the primary core aspect of their business that provides them a competitive advantage; they claim only that it’s being monitored by “an industry-leading fraud detection vendor.”
The report does acknowledge that:
“[Upwork’s] controls relating to customer identity verification, customer authentication, and fraud detection are complex. If such controls are not effective, our work marketplace may be perceived as not being secure, our reputation may be harmed, we may face regulatory action or action by our payment partners, payment networks, or other third parties, and our business may be adversely impacted.”
This statement, followed a few lines later by the admission they experienced a “significant increase in provision for transaction losses in the year ended Dec. 31, 2022, due to increased instances of fraud, higher chargeback losses, and bad debt losses related to clients of our Enterprise Solutions offering” — i.e. clients skipping the freelancer bill by initiating credit card chargebacks — indicates that, at least internally, Upwork is sweating the scamming issue.
‘[O]ur performance metrics may not accurately reflect activity on and the performance of our work marketplace.’
Further into the document, Upwork states that they “may be, and historically have been, held liable for the unauthorized use of credit or debit card details” like those chargebacks and acknowledge, at a certain point, the financial institutions caught in the middle of these shenanigans may someday hit them with fines and fees “or cease doing business with” them altogether.
In a section about disputes between clients over marketplace payments I found particularly relevant to my own case, Upwork states that “through our terms of service and services agreements for premium offerings, we disclaim responsibility and liability for any disputes between customers… however, we cannot guarantee that these terms will be effective in preventing or limiting our involvement in customer disputes or that these terms will be enforceable or otherwise effectively prevent us from incurring liability.”
Professor Dubal may be on to something.
The publicly available report even candidly acknowledges all the fraud is having an impact on their data sets, as they do not independently verify the performance metrics they track with internal tools. The report goes on to state that the company is “unable to identify and remove all fake accounts and fraudulent activity from being reflected in the performance metrics that we report. Accordingly, our performance metrics may not accurately reflect activity on and the performance of our work marketplace.”
This admission of potentially compromised data sets reminded me of a claim in a blog I came across while researching the company. Whistleblowing blogger Nebojsa “Nesha” Todorovic, who admittedly also did work for Upwork competitor GoLance at the time of the 2020 post, analyzed the sudden emergence of textually similar work posts he believed were from “fake job farms,” According to Todorovic, Upwork has a clear incentive for turning a blind eye toward posts tailor-made to attract novice freelancers with bulging Connect wallets.
Ghosting clients are just the tip of the iceberg
Todorovic, a Serbian writer who has blogged about many of Upwork’s changes over the years, elaborated on his case when I reached out to him. To him, those Connects are the lynchpin. He thinks the “beginning of the end” for Upwork was a 2019 earnings call — mere months after the company’s IPO — that reintroduced the lesser-used currency as a cornerstone of Upwork’s vision for the future. Previously, Connects cost $1 each, but as users got 60 free ones a month and job bids cost 1 or 2 (if any), there wasn’t much need for most users to buy extra. The Connects reboot dropped the pricing of them to $0.15 but raised the cost of job bids to a 0-6 Connect range (which has since been raised to upwards of 16).
‘[O]bviously, scammers are additional and valuable profit generators because they make freelancers spend connects. The biggest scammer is Upwork itself.’
So when Todorovic noticed the “fake job farms” in 2020, he didn’t just complain about the spam. He started connecting dots.
“There are some accounts, reviews, and jobs that are fake on Upwork,” he states in an email. “We can never know for sure what’s the exact percentage or number of these fake ‘elements’ that are the core substance of every freelance platform.”
In a follow-up post to the “fake job farm” one, Todorovic shares a screenshot where an Upwork community mod acknowledges the uptick in job post anomalies freelancers like Todorovic had noticed. This moderator goes on to state that “Upwork did review the jobs discussed on this thread and found that they were actually created as part of an outside course by a client teaching other clients how to use Upwork. They were posted as a ‘test job.'”
Todorovic remains skeptical to this day that anyone but Upwork was responsible for the phantom jobs, no matter what unnamed company is offered up as explanation.
“Plain and simple, Upwork decides who’s a scammer,” he begins, “but obviously, scammers are additional and valuable profit generators because they make freelancers spend connects. The biggest scammer is Upwork itself.”
When I asked Upwork if they’d like to respond to Todorovic’s allegations, this was their reply.
“Please thank Nebojsa for his feedback. We also encourage him to report suspicious behavior directly to us via the platform, as each report is investigated by our team and actioned appropriately. We take the integrity of our platform very seriously and have robust measures in place to detect and address fraudulent activities, and are committed to maintaining a safe and trustworthy environment for our customers.”
Despite the company’s statement, the data section in Upworks 2023 shareholder report would seem to indicate that Upwork does share Todrovic’s concerns about the influx of scammers on the platform, albeit for different reasons.
Claims of impropriety aside, Upwork’s 2024 Q1 earnings report suggests they’re hoping to foster a robust Connect-based economy, where users buy and spend more of the currency than ever before. While a cut of the action through percentage fees remains Upwork’s largest revenue stream, the quarterly report states that “revenue from ads & monetization products (i.e. Connects) grew 93% year-over-year, continuing to be Upwork’s fastest-growing revenue stream.”
The hunt for my scammer continues
Still certain I had a clear-cut breach of contract case on my hands, I opened a new support ticket requesting my old one be exhumed. I again let Upwork know of my intent to take Khuram to small claims court over the balance.
This time, the Executive Escalation team was at the helm for Upwork’s response. I was again informed that nothing from the suite of fraud-prevention protections and guarantees touted to prospective freelancers applied in my case. Though downgrading Support’s earlier description of Khuram’s messages to a simple “misunderstanding,” the representative acknowledged my request for info to aid in outside legal action and told me policy dictated they give Khuram one more ping before releasing anything to me.
As expected, Khuram held his tongue. Upwork’s legal team signed off on relinquishing the private personal information of one of their users to a demonstrably disgruntled and tenacious second user. Even while crossing this Rubicon, Upwork offered no recognition that Khuram had done anything wrong, let alone a promise that he would be banned, put on probation, or even looked into further.
[The] conditionality of Upwork’s commitment to its customers finally came into full focus for me.
The contact email and number support Upwork gave me immediately proved to be dead ends, but that didn’t matter because I had his full name — Khuram Dhanani — a name with SEO-friendliness outmatched only by my own. So I set to poking about and pulling threads on the internet in the ways that only vengeful injured parties (and suspicious significant others) do.
My quarry’s positive ID came quickly, packaged in juicier dirt than I ever could have hoped for. The more I looked into this guy, the deeper and funnier the rabbit hole got, and the focus of my ire shifted from Khuram to the companies that gave him safe habitats to thrive.
But the story of my runaway client is somehow even longer and more mind-bending than everything I learned about Upwork over the course of this odyssey. There’s his Potemkin office park of fictional companies he claims to have founded. There was his “interview” by a text-to-speech British-accented woman’s voice on the only episode of an obscure podcast titled “London Digital.” There are his numerous Nathan Fielder-esque Twitter posts about living the good life with photos either taken from outside the trendy restaurants he claimed to have just dined at or borrowed from travel websites when he felt like flexing his hotel arrangement.
Khuram is still ultimately responsible for his actions. And he still owes me $475 that I’d prefer to not take him to small claims court over. (Just DM me, man.) But as interesting as it was to follow the life journey of an intrepid kid who started out flipping his parents’ brick-and-mortar jewelry shop best sellers on Yahoo Marketplace for bigger profits and telling victimless fibs in the comment section of a SpaghettiMonster.org post about a Burning Man wedding only to turn into a flim-flam man who seemed to have no qualms about stealing directly from individuals like me, he’s ultimately just some guy.
Taking my cue from Professor Dubal, I thought it’d be better to go after the ecosystem that allows him to pull his fast ones.
I did finally encourage a little action from Upwork when I reached out one last time to tell them I was doing this story. While I waited for their rep to get back to me, I noticed that someone had changed the status of my contract with Khuram (which had been unresolved this whole time) to “complete,” and text had been inserted into our private message exchange that stated “Khuram D. is currently restricted from this conversation.”
After I asked if this was SOP for all completed contracts, someone from customer support confirmed that Upwork had indeed closed my contract and explained “we don’t prevent clients from communicating with freelancers after a contract ends unless there is a valid reason to do so, such as having an account hold in place, which limits access to certain features like message rooms.”
To say this hint of Khuram’s account only now possibly having a hold on it after so much fuss felt like a hollow victory would be an understatement. The support email concluded with more of the usual links about how I can “report suspicious activity” and “stay safe” while using the platform going forward.
The official company response in my inbox contained more boilerplate assurances about how Upwork “considers the trust and safety of our customers to be of utmost importance” and mentioned their oft-touted-but-never-expounded-upon “trust & safety policies, systems, and a dedicated operations team working 24/7 to detect, prevent, and remove fraudulent platform activity.” I was told for the umpteenth time that “it’s critical that freelancers adhere to our Terms of Service and follow the best practices we share to stay protected.”
But this time, the draconian conditionality of Upwork’s commitment to its customers finally came into full focus for me.
If you are part of the 91 percent of consumers who don’t read pages of legal writing every time you sign up for a new app or account, Upwork can and likely will tell you to kick rocks should misfortune happen to befall you while using their platform. Even if you go in with the best of intentions and do your part to protect yourself, if you happen to break any rule—even one you weren’t aware of—while attempting to find work while avoiding the horde of scammers that Upwork acknowledges are prowling the site, recounting your plight will only result in cold comfort from the company and its most fanatical supporters.
As work on this article was winding down I made a few more attempts to get in touch with Khuram for comment via email and phone, all to no avail. But my last pokes around Khuram’s Upwork profile did reveal something that I’d never seen once before over my numerous visits.
At the bottom of the page for the original job post that got me, beneath the work description and stats about how much engagement the post was earning was a section titled “Client’s recent history.” According to a post on the Upwork subreddit, this feature was down site-wide from October 2023 through March 2024, when I really needed it.
Khuram’s history lists the 50 most recent job posts he hired for, the star rating and comment (if given) by the freelancer hired, and how much he paid them. Of those 50 jobs, dating as far back as May ’22, 39 hirees were paid out only $5. A 40th was paid $6. Each of these 40 was hired for writing work, many lured by the same post claiming to be “Looking For Long Term [sic] Article & Blog Writer” advertising a $44.50—$120 hourly rate. There were comments left among the numerous 1-star reviews describing bait-and-switch tales similar to my own, claiming he took off with their samples, or plainly warning others to avoid this “scammer.”
But in June of 2024, well after I — and presumably at least a few of these others — had raised our concerns with Upwork, and their crack security protocols had assessed the threat, Khuram was back hiring for a “photo manipulation” job which, to his credit, he paid $30 for.
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