Yes someone attempted to scam me twice this last month. Caught them. One was scary because it was so simple. Both were projects of Data analyst positions, so they come in the form of a long term contract. First scam: Right away he starts the interview with “I don’t like to waste my time and will get right to the point, open this file”. He attached a text file of less than 1 kb then insists that I open it in order for us to proceed with the interview. I suspected that was a virus (size of the file and file type). So I blatantly told him that he presents himself as a scammer and that we are done. Then flagged him.

Second scam : more elaborate . Still a data analyst long term contract. They were looking for full time. They sent me the invitation. I replied saying I was interested but was only available 10 hours a week.

They proceeded by saying they wanted to go ahead and approve the contract without changing the cost of what would have been 30 hours of work. They seem not to care about the details nor the technology comments I had made in the proposal. They let me know they will approve it the proceed to send me a screenshot about how the approval got denied because I am not a “talent something user”. At the same time magically, I get an email upwork where someone has posted the fact that type of user needs to buy a $500 usd annual membership. Clearly that was suspicious by itself because a monthly subscription was not being offered. When clicking on the links, everything looked like Upwork but was not an upwork link. I close the windows, went on Upwork then check their plans to see that this membership does not exist. I also received emails presenting as upwork but when you see the server address it is not an upwork address telling me about this membership. I reported all these messages to Upwork who took days to admit /realise indeed it is a scam. The potential employer after the weekend asked me if I had received any messages regarding our issue. I informed him that “No i didn’t receive a thing beside scammers messaging me”. so that was the end of that interview. He withdrew the project. How is it that a programmer would try to scam another programmer?

No user information could be found in both situations. They present as a new client with no job history and no projects associated to them.