Freelance Scam: Don’t Share Your Account
Alright. Today’s topic was going to be answering a question from a long time reader about where to start and guidelines for PPC advertising.
That will now come later in the week for a couple of reasons:
- I thought my hands/arms were healed but they’re not. They’re burning like hell right now.
- I knew more about the topic than I thought.
So check back in the next few days for that topic.
Today I’m going to quickly talk about a freelance scam that’s running around on the major platforms and stuff.
Don’t Share Your Freelancing Account
If you have a Fiverr account, don’t share it. If you have an Upwork account, don’t share it. For whatever platform you use, don’t share it.
Recently, people have said, “Hey… I’ll buy access to your freelance account” and it’s usually under the guise of them getting access to your market.
(It tends to be Asian guys who say that they’ll pay to share your account, do the work and split the funds with you because it’ll look like they’re in America.)
This is obviously stupid.
Don’t share your freelance account with anyone. It’s a scam at worst and at best it’s the same as sharing your bank account with someone – again, a terrible idea.
Now, regular readers are a smart bunch and so don’t need to hear this. You might be new though, and so the advice is for you.
Also, we’ll add to it.
I saw another scam where some unscrupulous devil was saying, “Hey, can you send us money and then we’ll blah blah…”
Never send anyone any money in order to do a freelance job for them. You are the one getting paid.
Don’t send money to people. You shouldn’t have to.
End of story.
Let’s spread this out to some wider value for the smart dudes who read this site though.
But What About If You’re Managing Freelancers / VA’s?
I saw a question on a business group the other day about letting VA’s have access to your stuff.
My experience is limited here but it’s limited to the best practice I recommend: only give them access to their job stuff.
So if you have a blog and you hire a ghostwriter, let them have contributor access so they can post their blogs to your site.
At the very worst, you will have to delete the spam they’ll try and put on your site and then you fire them without paying them.
At the best, they can do their job uninterrupted.
You don’t need to give them access to your admin panel and all the other options.
The same is true with social media stuff. Here’s what I recommend: Get an account with a social media manager like Hootsuite or something. A lot of these have different levels of access and if those are available, use them.
But outside of that, upload the passwords and admin stuff and use a different password for everything.
Then you can have your social media person log into that, do their work and not ever get the logins for your social media sites.
The best bet (and the one I use) is to just have your person deliver stuff directly to you and then you do the uploading, though I can understand why people don’t.
I’d recommend – and have never done this – if you live in the first world and you need to hire someone to manage stuff, that you hire someone in your country and take all of their details as you would an employee. There, the threat of repercussion might exist.
(Hint: It doesn’t if you hire a Pakistani SEO guy for $5. He doesn’t care if your site tanks when he links to a bunch of porn sites and good luck getting any sort of dispute resolution against him.
Very different if you hire a twenty two year old graduate from your city and make them hand sign a contract that says they won’t be a dick.)
Conclusion
Don’t get scammed. Don’t share your details unless it’s with a reputable organisation. Keep admin access to yourself.
If you’re going to hire someone that needs access to everything, you can mitigate it by actually hiring someone in your own country that’s incentivised legally to not mess you around.
Catch you in the next one.