ChewToy: FreelanceTracker.ai

A complex fraud operation somewhere in Europe.

The annotated image for this article has been sitting on my desktop for a couple months. I was assisting a technology client with a hosting problem, there was a need for something I can’t easily do, so we posted an Upwork job.

It got one response, a woman with an American sounding name, with some sort of smooth accent, claiming to be from a Baltic country. She promptly tried to move the job off platform, I was instantly suspicious, and rightly so.

So here’s to you, “Evelyn”, and I’d like to extend that to whatever nom de scam you adopt after this article gets noticed.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Caught a grifter. You either like this genre, or you don’t.

Infrastructure:

The person I encountered is one of perhaps a number of operators who draw people off legitimate platforms like Upwork. They move them to one of a series of sites they control, get Paypal information, and then nick the victims for $6,900 or a bit less. They’re avoiding some sort of limit that triggers law enforcement attention. There used to be a $7,500 red line in the U.S., but they’re seemingly in Europe.

Names and profiles and such are malleable, given the scope of the system in use it’s entirely plausible there’s a small team of women working the victim facing portion, but infrastructure is a much bigger investment, so let’s focus on this.

Sorry for enormous 4k image, the original Upwork Grifter Maltego is here, and I made an Open Threat Exchange pulse for this: FreelanceTracker.ai Upwork Grifter.

And here’s your start point for hunting FreelaneTracker.ai on LinkedIn.

Upwork Fails Hard:

There was never any response from the company about this. One would think they’d have a little more care for the safety of their customers. One would be quite mistaken.

Conclusion:

If you hunt for the company names you can see in the Maltego graph there are a variety of victims who’ve weighed in on Reddit. I think this was some direct interaction on the company’s LinkedIn profile, not sure why I saved it. I have a bunch more stuff like this if someone from either Upwork or law enforcement would like to have a go at this.

But hopefully by illuminating this, the internet’s immune system will stir itself and take care of the problem.