The past few days I started getting interview invites from companies and people I had never heard of. I initially shrugged it off as aggressive spam, but after declining one of the invites, one of the emailers followed up to confirm that I was the same person that they were talking to on Upwork.

I had never setup an Upwork profile before so I said no, after which they responded with a link to a profile of someone that was completely impersonating me. They had scraped my LinkedIn page for information and were interviewing under the guise of being someone they were not (they were even using my picture). I talked to Upwork support, and after about 36 hours they deleted the impersonator. However, I just did another search and there is already someone else impersonating me again (this time they changed the face on the picture).

I only discovered this because the first impersonator was too lazy to change my resume they downloaded from my website and kept my real email on it, so some companies had used that email to contact me instead of their Upwork registered email.

I would recommend everyone search for their name on Upwork (I had to wrap mine in quotes to find the matches) and make sure they aren't being impersonated.

In the meantime, Upwork really needs a better validation mechanism. As engineers we really have no recourse, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent this from happening.