Very Close to Being Scammed
Let me praface this with the fact that I have been on Upwork for 5+ years. I have nearly $200,000 in earnings and a loooong history on the platform. I would consider myself quite tech savvy in general, and wouldn't easily be fooled.
The other day is the closest I have ever come to being scammed. I work in the Market Analysis sector, and a client reached out to me for an industry report regarding crypto sectors and charting trends. It all seemed legitimate. The client had a verified phone number and identity (though no past spend on Upwork. Dubious but nothing very strange). He asked all of the right questions and spoke flawlessly. Definitely not AI or anything suspect in his speech. His location was Western US and he messaged exactly as I would expect for said region.
He asked good questions, took his time and read through what I was saying with very pertinent and good responses. We spoke for nearly an hour and nothing was rushed. He was using English language nuances you would only expect from a native speaker, and carried enough slang and error in his messages that I know it wasn't automated. He also really responded well to what I said.
After about an hour, we were close to coming to an agreement. He liked what I said but needed "1 more thing". He wanted me to look at a Docsend document and answer a few questions regarding how I would analyse said data. It's not something thats very common, and I wouldn't normally do it without a contract in place, but the markets been slow and I was bored so why not. I made sure to tell him we couldn't share any contact information or personal details before a contract is in place, and he assured me nothing of the sorts was in the document.
After his assurance I ran the link through some checkers to make sure nothing untoward was going on, and they all came back relatively clean. clicked on the document (should be an online doc, no downloading needed for DocSend), but was prompted with an error message along the lines of "this document cannot be viewed online. You need the docsend application to view". Anytime a download is involved, my hazard lights go off. My computer was giving me some worrying indications about said download also. I did some looking into it and Docsend doesn't even have an application. It's all online.
I asked the client about this and even his follow ups seemed genuine. He was saying "oh I don't want you to do anything risky, it's okay. I'll share the info through chat in a condensed versio" etc. I knew what was happening at this point, but the commitment to the act was very convincing.
The next day, I logged on and all correspondence with him was gone. I was prompted error messages by Upwork when trying to load the job post, and our chat had been deleted from my conversations. It was genuinely a high quality scam. I know there are elements I should have been more cautious with, which I will definitely learn from also. Gotta be safe out there people.