"How Many People Work on This Upwork Account?" — Boss Hilariously Details Multiple Employee Scam

A tech startup boss discovered how he was scammed by a remote hire through Upwork after holding several daily meetings. By the third day of the new worker's tenure, he started to get the sneaking suspicion the person on the other line of the call wasn't who they were pretending to be.

The tale was relayed through the Silver app's official TikTok account, @withsilverapp.

"Watch my boss discover his new hire scammed him for an entire week through Upwork," a text overlay in the video reads. The clip begins with a recording of the TikToker's boss sitting at a table and talking about the situation to someone else off-camera.

"When you talk to someone at Upwork, the person that joins the video call is usually, they do a very good job presenting themselves."

He continued to discuss the situation: "I said there's one hard requirement. We have our daily stand-up at 9 a.m. every day. 9 a.m. comes and goes, and I'm like, 'Hey how are you?' And he said, 'I didn't know I was supposed to join a meeting.' I said, 'Yeah we talked about that like, it's fine, engineers don't like meetings anyway. It's OK.' He's like, 'I'm joining right now.' Cool."

Letting that first red flag slide, the TikToker's boss goes on to detail more of their interactions with the Upwork employee. "The first 15 minutes, Dan goes, 'You go, everyone gives a little status update and he joins the call as I'm giving mine. And I said and I finished up this page today, and he pipes up and says oh, great."

"And then I got started on the mock-ups for our authentication feature whatever and he goes, oh that's good to hear. And it was like, there's a group meeting there's like, 10 people in the call." He says, finding the awkward nature of the new hire's responses funny. "You don't have to answer, in my head I was like how do I say that? No need to respond to everything I say. Like no one else here is."

But, again, he didn't seem to find any of this to be too big of a deal. That is, until the next morning's meeting occurred and the man was a no-show again. "Little bit weird, not as polished, as, you know when I talked to him one on one, but that's OK. Tuesday morning comes, 9 a.m. He doesn't show. All right so I get on Slack, I was like you need to join today too. You join every day. He says OK, OK."

"So he joins and we're like you wanna give an update? And he says I'm actually driving at the moment. We're like oh, OK. 9 a.m. our time is like 9 p.m. his time. Like OK, he's kinda like driving. His voice sounded a little bit different. That's a little bit weird. So Wednesday morning, joins audio, no video. And the voice sounded a little bit like, deeper."

It's at this point that he begins to suspect that this was an entirely different person attending these meetings. "Like, hey, hey Dan. And I was like, texting Dan Ariany, is this a different like voice? It's like I don't know, maybe? And sounds like do you have any updates? He's like no, no update but I'm really excited, I'm gonna put a lot of effort into it tonight."

It wasn't the most confidence-inspiring response, but things got even worse. "At the end of the call I said you're unblocked, ready to go? He's like no I need get a demo from you to figure out how the thing works. I was like, has no one given you a demo? And he's like no I've never seen a demo. I was like so you haven't written any code yet? He's like no of course, how can I write code? I haven't seen a demo."

Commenting further on the bizarre situation, it became more and more apparent that the person in the Upwork interview certainly wasn't the person attending the calls who was working the coding job he was hired to perform. "I said how many people work on this Upwork account? He's like, just me. Said how many people really work on this Upwork account? And he goes OK, just me and a couple of friends."

The TikToker's boss relayed to the new hire(s) that they're not going to be able to have a working relationship with each other. "Like, I obviously can't work with you. I need a refund. Like I've been paying you like a couple of hours. Three different people. No four different people on four different days. And the last guy seemed nice enough."

He even seemed to concede that he wouldn't have had a problem just hiring the last person he spoke with. "I went onto Upwork I said you know I'd like my money back. And then the text message back said why would you want your money back? I thought our relationship was going really well."

Baffled by the response from whoever was replying on the Upwork account, the TikToker's boss detailed his reply. "I was like oh, it's OK. I spoke to another one of the members of the team just now. He told me that like, explained the whole situation. Yeah, the news hadn't gone around," he says at the end of the clip.

Several TikTokers responded in the comments section of the video that the TikToker's boss seemed like a fun person to work with. Someone else commented that they peeped a look at an application open on a computer in the background of the video, and that the job he was asking the programmers to work on didn't seem all too complicated.

"20+ years dev here. I see Sublime Text open in the background, note how this guy isn't talking about a complicated programming task, it's always the people that are the hardest part of the job."

Have you ever been in a company that had a bizarre hiring scam story occur?