A General Tip For Avoiding Scams On Upwork
I use the term Upwork since it’s a popular platform used to hire people online, but this applies to anywhere really, even ‘real life’. This isn’t advice, just general information. Here’s a really good article on their site which pretty much covers everything, but I’d like to toss out an idea for people wanting to earn money online, when you’re new to freelancing. As you sift through posted jobs, eventually, you’ll see jobs where the client is new to the platform, and has little to no profile history. So, they don’t have an established track record, to show evidence of being an ideal customer. By the way just because someone supposedly has an good online reputation doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t pull an exit scam. An exit scam typically works where a seller earns a couple of jobs through decent performance, makes customers happy, and then loads up on sales at once and walks away with the money of the next set of customers. This seems less likely on Upwork but happened on the dark web and still probably does. Variations of it occur in real life every-day.
Anyway, how can you know you’re work will be compensated. The short answer is you can’t,. It’s probably best to assume you’ll be taken advantage of, to prepare against it. So, you should perform what freelancers, construction workers, etc. do in the regular business world: Comp them 20% of the work for free (within reason) and once they see you can do the job, they pay you for that first milestone worth of work, and continue on until the project is completed. Just a general tip, anybody serious can afford and will work by the milestone. So, like steps, payments are released each step at a time.
With that being said, paying anyone up front for all the work in advance is very foolish, even if you know them personally, and anyone demanding it is usually a scammer, so don’t be foolish. Now, also, this is really situationally specific so would not be the best idea in all cases, of course. I mean, if you’ve got serious risk involved, losing 20% of five hours of labor is much different than spending 20k to code software or something. You can see how in that case it’d even be a bad idea. This isn’t specific advice, just for educational purposes.
So, that’s the tip: Be willing to do the project by the milestone, (20% or less each milestone within reason). And, on the opposite side of the coin, don’t pay more than 20% down on work in advance to anybody.
This also gives you time to understand if the client is going to be a time wasting ‘tire kicker’. There are often people who have very unrealistic expectations for what they’re willing to pay. Human nature is to want something for nothing.
If the job is for just a couple hours of work maybe it’s more of a waste of time to request milestone payments than it’s worth with the back and forth emails. Personally, if something takes more than a day’s work that would be my milestone. That way you can still pay your bills if the other person has no intention of paying, and you’re not put in a bad spot. I mean, how far do you want to be strung along before you realize you’re wasting your time?
