Scammers going global leveraging freelance services

In my previous post, I was discussing the various trust issues that are encountered when dealing with an online community. I was discussing some issues related to translation jobs sabotage by scammers. My point was the risks in freelance translation jobs are much higher on the customer side than on the translator side. The main argument was it's hard to turn a small translation job into cash. Well, scammers have more imagination that I have, and it seems that this argument is partially wrong.

I have just recently banned a few translation jobs on PeopleWords. Basically, a scammer was trying to use freelancers to translate typical scam letters. Indeed the main letter topic (the letter content was on public display by the scammer) was related to a large amount of money somehow blocked in a country of Central Africa. It was quite perfectly fitting the typical scam patterns (see 419Eater for an introduction to the common scam practice and how to fight them).

Moral of the story: scammers are fast movers, like any ambitious company they want to go global. Freelance translators will be on the front line of this move.

Building a safe community for online translation works

This article focuses on the various issues related to online trust for freelance translation jobs and the various solutions adopted by freelance websites in this domain. As for all online activities, trust is a difficult yet critical element to obtain. My personal experience in this domain comes from the management of the PeopleWords website.

The naive approach: the rating system

Most freelance websites provide a rating system for all users (PeopleWords is no exception, see [1]). After each translation job, the customer can rate the translator and vice-versa. On the long run, competent translators and reliable customers accumulate a large amount of positive evaluations. The trust is build on those evaluations. Yet the downside of the rating system is the initialization phase. This part should not be neglected because every customer or translator has to go through that phase in the first place (no matter matter how "established" the website can be). Most of the websites that I am aware of don't do much beside their rating system. For example, since PeopleWords is just starting at this moment, nobody has positive evaluations (well, I do have positive evaluations, see what the the translators say about me, but being the website operator myself, it does not count much). I will start with a short analysis of the risks involved for unrated translators or customers. The analysis is followed by an evaluation of a few approaches that can be used to solve those issues.

Risk analysis on the translator side

For example, on PeopleWords, a translator is paid only on translated documents delivery. Therefore there is a risk for the translator to accept a job and not get paid in this end. The important question is What is the risk of accepting a job from an unrated customer?. My personal opinion on that matter is not much. I am not saying that dishonest customers do not exist, I am just saying that I believe them to be quite infrequent, probably not more than a few percents. Why?

• It's hard, as a customer, not to reveal your identity through the documents to be translated. In this aspect, the situation is not symmetric between customers and translators. The online translator can easily disguises his identity, but the task is much harder for the online customer. As a crook, your identity is certainly the last thing you would like to reveal to your victims.


• Almost no translation job comes as a one shot. If you need a translator now, then, most probably, you will need a translator again in a near future. Therefore it is more interesting, even on a sole financial basis, to have a stable customer/translator relationship rather than trying to crook random translators again and again. Also the web is not a very forgiving place, if you crook somebody, this person is probably not going to sue you (at least not for $100) but this person can hurt your reputation in spreading the word through forums or blogs. Additionally if the job is a large and obvious one shot then the translator can ask for a fragmentation of the payments as the work goes on.


• As a customer, what you obtain from the translator has no financial value for anybody but yourself or your company. This point should not be overlooked. Indeed, if I refuse to pay an online vendor on eBay after receiving an ordered product, I can actually re-sell this product and obtain some cash from it. But in case of a translation job, I have no simple way to turn a translated document into cash.

As a side argument, I would add that online freelancers are well-armed against online frauds. Professional freelancers are usually quite experienced in the art of dealing with "remote" people. Exactly like experienced web users easily spot phishing attacks, experienced freelancers can probably identify most of the online scam.

Risk analysis on the customer

Typical freelance scam: Through many years experience, I translate all documents in many languages. All domains. Lowest prices. No delay. Please contact me at vishnu123@gmail.com.

As a customer, since you pay only on documents delivery, there are not risks, right? Wrong, there are a lot of risks. Worse, the customer may not even realize that he has been crooked before the document is actually published in one form or an other.

• As a customer, you have no way to check the quality (or even the content) of the translated documents. How can I check that the translator just didn't use a software to produce a abysmal translation of my documents? This point is very important, because it means that crooks can actually turn translation jobs into cash through sabotage.


• The costs involved through missed deadlines (or through poor translation qualities) can
  
  also vastly exceed the translation costs. In other words, if the customer does not get the translated documents within a given deadline (or if the quality is poor), the delay (or the bad impact) can cost him much more that the actual translator fees.

The translation sabotage is really a major issue. On PeopleWords, I have identified that

roughly 20% of the translation offers are just scam. This problem is far from being specific to PeopleWords. On most of the website that I have tried, the scam rate was, in my experience, always roughly the same (actually, I would say, the more "established" the website, the higher the scam rate). The fact that customers are, on average, much less experienced than freelancers to deal with scammers is only aggravating the problem.

Solution n'1 that does not work: Screening job offers for pre-approval

Most of the freelance websites actually screen all offers for a pre-approval by their staff before publishing the offers. One obvious drawback of such an approach is the additional business day of delay to get a job offer published. The second drawback is that such a screening process requires human resources that are paid, in the end, by the customers.

There are basically two kinds of abusive job offers. This first kind is just plain classical spam (the content of the offer is simply totally irrelevant to any translation job). This kind of abuse is annoying but mostly harmless for the freelance translators. The second kind of abuse is the case of the never-paying customers that continuously create new accounts under different names to crook freelance translators on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, the second kind of abuse is never going to be filtered because no matter how dedicated are the website operators, the offer "looks" right (there is nothing wrong with the actual offer content).

My opinion is that many websites rely on such a pre-approval step because it gives them a (false) sensation of control. But clearly this practice does not add any value either for the customer (whose job offers are delayed) or for the translators (because real abuse won't be filtered).

Solution n'2 that does not work: Escrow account

Some websites propose an escrow account where the customer can put the money at the beginning of the job. When the job is done, the customer releases the amount frozen in the escrow account. In case of disagreement, a neutral party is called to "solve" the case. The important question is Does the escrow account reduce the overall risks or costs? My conclusions are actually quite counter-intuitive: I believe that the escrow account increases the risks and the costs for both customers and translators.

But if the escrow account provides no advantage for either the customer or the freelancer, why does it even exists? Why web designer would have ever bothered to implement such a system if it was the case?

My opinion (discussed below) is that customers and freelancers have no interest into relying on escrow accounts; but there is one person that has actually a strong financial interest in such a system: the website operator himself. Indeed, the "frozen" money on the escrow account is not frozen for everyone, the money is actually earning interests for the profit of the website

operator. Moreover that money is actually providing a large amount of cash to run the website to the detriment of both customers and translators. In case of non-disagreement, the escrow account is clearly just a financial overhead for both of them.

Let us see now what happen in case of disagreement. The disagreement can only occurs if the customer refuses to release the money from the escrow account. Why would the customer do that? Case A: the customer is a crook, he wants his money back. Case B: the translator is a crook, the translation does not match the quality requirements. In any case, the customer, being honest or not, will claim that the translated documents do not meet some "quality" requirements. For the neutral party who is supposed to "solve" the case, it's going to be tough; because unless you have 200 translators covering all technical domains in all languages, you have no (reliable) way to tell if the customer is honest or not.

Worse, the neutral party has no interest to solve the case (well, no interest to solve it as fast as possible). The longer it takes to solve the case, the more profitable it is because the money is earning interests on neutral party bank account. At the end, what happen? Since I tend to pay freelance translators when I require their services, I have never experienced myself the "disagreement resolution" part of the system; therefore the following is just a wild guess of my own (remember that we are considering people with no previous ratings). In case of disagreement, the website operator will wait first and then he will take a random decision (like splitting the amount of money in two and sending 50% back to the customer). Why a random decision? Because, as a website operator, you cannot financially afford a "wise" decision to each disagreements. It is not possible to pay a reliable offline translators to evaluate disagreements when your profit margin is lower than 5%. As a consequence, only option available to the website operator is just to take random (or quasi-random) decisions.

Filtering abusive translators: a solution that might work

Abusive translation offers is the Number One issue for customers and translators alike. Why? Because abusive translators

(i.e. scammers) hurt the freelance system as a whole. Being myself a customer of freelance translation services, I have always a feeling of walking through a minefield when I browse freelance translator offers. As I said, roughly 20% of the offers definitively look very suspicious. As a direct consequence, I would guess that most customers will simply be very reluctant to hazard a translation job over the web because of the "minefield" answers that you get.

The situation is not desperate though. The good news is that liars tend to be greedy and lazy too. When I started to browse the system logs of PeopleWords (that include the times, the languages, the number of offers made by each translators), I realized that scammers where basically all following the same patterns: they answer all open translation job offers in less then 10 mins. Languages do not matter (scammers can do anything ...), specialized technical documents are never an issue and no matter the amount of work it can always be done in 48h. As I said, scammers are too greedy to actually resist the urge of answering ALL open translation job offers, and scammers are too lazy to actually create accounts with ad hoc profiles that would actually match the translations jobs.

What should be done with those of scammers? Banning them is a bad idea. Indeed, once banned, the scammer will just come back under a different name, and we are back to the starting point. Therefore, in PeopleWords, I have opted for a more twisted solution, scammers are just shadowed. Since the scammer is not banned, he can continue to browse all translation offers, he can also continue to post offers too. The only difference being that offers send through a shadowed account are never visible from the customer side... This system is not perfect, a scammer can create customer account, log in, post a job, log out, log in again, post a offer, log out, log into the customer account again, and check if his offer is visible. But it's a time-consuming process and scammers are already too lazy to provide a user profile that would simply match the translation jobs anyway.

I believe that this approach has a large added value for both the customers and the translators. Indeed, those scams are obvious only from a website operator viewpoint (that can easily spot translators making inconsistent offers), but would probably less than obvious for the customer that do not have access the website logs.

Filtering abusive customers: a solution that might work

As I discussed here above, the most "dangerous" kind of abusive customers are not spammers (those are just annoying), it's the never-paying customers seeking "free" translations, crooking each time a different translator. Since no particular patterns (at least no obvious patterns) can be used to distinguish such a customer, it is not possible to "catch" them before they actually crook at least one translator. Moreover, since the customer ends up with a negative evaluation after crooking a translator, he never use the same account twice. Ratings are just useless to deal with those people.

The approach used by PeopleWords consists in relying on the only people that are actually able detect the fraud: the translators themselves. In order to leverage the "distributed" knowledge, PeopleWords includes a system dedicated to abuse reports. Freelancers can actually help the website to prevent such a customer crooking other freelancers.

What should be done with those crooks? Again, banning them is a bad idea because they will come back. I am still currently hesitating between several options to deal with such users. The option currently in use consists in shadowing their offers. A shadowed offer is not visible anymore by the translators. The only issue being they will quickly realize that something is wrong if they do not get any offers; because when you propose a translation freelance job, you always get offers. Therefore, as an additional option, I am thinking of using the scammers list but for the reverse purpose. Instead of displaying the legit translator offers, only the scam offers are displayed to such customers. This option is so twisted I am not sure to actually ever use it, but using scammers to fight back never-paying customers is still a very interesting perspective.

Notes

[1] PeopleWords only provides binary evaluations: I am satisfied or I am not satisfied (plus an additional but optional comment). This system is very rough compared to most of the other websites. For example, Guru.com provides no less than 10,000 possible rating combinations after each job (4 evaluation criterions ranging from 1 to 10 involve indeed 10,000 combinations). If PeopleWords has such a simple system, it is not due to the lack of fund (PeopleWords is dramatically under-funded) but a design choice. If tomorrow, PeopleWords provides 20 evaluation criterions each one of them ranging from 1 to 100, will the PeopleWords ratings become 10 times more accurate than Guru's ratings? Certainly not. As a customer, I have no clear idea of the "quality" of the translation job anyway. I can use MS Word spell checker to see if the translator has left many obvious spelling mistakes, but I can't really do more. As a translator, there is, usually, not much to say about the customer either. My personal opinion is that providing more complicated rating systems actually decrease the quality of the ratings. Indeed, if the system is not totally idiot proof, then users will start to do mistakes simply because they do not understand the system. For example, if you can evaluate somebody on a scale ranging from 1 to 10, what is the meaning of 10? In the German educational system, 1 is the best grade. In the French (primary) educational system, 10 is the best grade. Some other countries, like the USA, prefer the use of letters. Bottom-line: do not try to be smart, you will just confuse your users.

A few marketing tips for online freelance translators from a customer view point

Let me get the point clear: I am not a translator, I have never step a foot into a translation agency and I know nothing about the translation business. But as a simple customer, I have had a large amount of interactions with many freelance translators (most of this experience is related to the setup of the PeopleWords website).

Good online marketing is about sending positive signals to the customers. As a freelance translator, what signals are you sending to your customers?

If I am writing this small guide, it's because I have noticed that translators, in my experience, have, on average, really poor online marketing strategies. When I say "online marketing strategy", I mean What are you doing to convince a customer that you are an honest and brilliant translator. I have seen dozens of translators, often claiming years of experience for large and well-established companies, doing so ridiculous mistakes in their interactions with potential customers (i.e. myself) that I think a few "marketing" tips might not be totally unnecessary.

Sending your resume

Frankly for a $100 online translation, I am never going to read your resume. Consider that for a $100 job, I am receiving a dozens of resume. Do you really think that a typical customer is going to read 20 pages (or more) of resume for a $100 job? Additionally, there are so many resume just freely available on the web, what kind of proof is that? What tells me that you did not just get a random resume on the web and put your name on it? For online translation jobs, the usability of resumes is close to zero.

Not disclosing your personal data

What is your real name, your address, etc? Most online translators seem to be very reluctant to disclose anything. Do not expect the customer to ask you such information, you have to disclose everything first. Just consider the customer position: if you have to choose between 1) a "real" person with a "real" name and a "real" address; 2) a fly-by-night anonymous login. Who would you choose? By the way, what are the risks of disclosing such information anyway? If you are afraid of being visible on the web, surrender now all hopes to become a successful online translator. Also avoid any john.smith@hotmail.com, john.smith@yahoo.com and john.smith@gmail.com e-mail addresses. Those e-mail providers are widely known to be totally anonymous. You need a trustful e-mail address (see point below).

Not having your own website (or blog)

A website or a blog (with some content in it) is really a strong signal for the customer. It means that you have a persistent online existence. Persistence means that you did not appear last week and consequently that you will most-probably still exist next week. The number one quality of freelance translator homepage is not shiny designs (who care's if it's just plain text) but bilingual content. Your page must be available at least in two languages. What a better proof that you're not a soon-to-be-vanished crook? Setting up an homepage requires only a few hours of work. Yet, my guess would be that more than 95% of the freelance translators do not have a personal homepage.

Poorly written communications

As a French customer, I can't judge whether you're writing good Chinese or not. I have no way to check your Chinese writing skills. Therefore, I will judge your skills based on what you will be writing to me. If your communications are constantly full of spelling mistakes, how can I trust you not having the same amount of spelling mistakes in the translated documents? My experience is that more than half of translators do not pay any attention to the spelling mistake in their communications. Spelling mistakes are a strong negative signal for the customer.

Unfocused job application

This point is connected to the resume discussion here above. A customer posting online a translation job is most likely to get at least a dozen of competitive translation offers. Therefore, your answer must be sharp and focused. Do not cut-and-paste a 10 line presentation of yourself, it's almost as pointless as sending your resume. In your answer, you must prove to the customer that you have some understanding of his context and that your experience matches his documents. In the customer's mind, such an answer sends a highly positive signal that you've already started to work on his case (which is not totally untrue).

As final note, remember that the customer choices are more a matter of trust than a matter of price.

A translator-friendly RESX file editor

A newer version of ResxEditor is now available, see my lastest blog post on this matter.

In a previous post, I was giving some details on the RESX format from a translator-friendly viewpoint. Actually, after proof-testing the XML concept with a few translators, I came up with the conclusion

The most brilliant Uzbek-Azeri translators do not speak XML. Do not seek any explanation, it's just a fact.

XML has a logic which is totally alien to the average translator. The answer to the question Why can't I freely insert < and > characters? simply does not match the average translator skills. Therefore, I have decided to come up with a more simple and elegant solution.

I have published a simple Resx Editor utility that comes as a stand-alone exe file. This application is free (yet not open-source, although I am considering the option) and will remain free.

Available features

The ResxEditor is a simple quasi-wysiwyg editor; at least the raw XML is kept hidden from the translator view. The features are limited to the bare minimum Open, Save and Save As, plus a text size adjustment option.

Features not available (also they should)

I have not included a Print feature (yet). Whether it is a must-have feature will depend on the feedback that I get. Actually, one of my objective is to keep this editor as simple and small as possible.

If there are features that you would really want to see in Resx Editor (or bugs that you really would not), feel free to post a comment.

Best practice for website design, sandboxing with ASP.Net

Why should I care?

The web makes application deployment easier, but there is no magic web-effect that would prevent web designers of commiting the very same mistakes that regular developers commit while designing classical applications. In order to minimize the risks, I have found the notion of website sandboxing as a must-have for web designers.

What is sandboxing?

A sandbox is a place full of sand where children cannot cause any harm even if they intend to.

Replace children by visitors or testers and you have a pretty accurate description of what is website sandboxing. More technically, a website sandbox is simply a copy of your web application. A sandbox differs from a mirror from a data management viewpoint. The sandbox databases are just dummy replications of the running databases. The sandbox holds absolutely no sensitive data. Moreover, the sandbox databases might be just cleared at the end of each release cycle.

What are the benefits of sandboxing?

The first obvious advantage is that you can have shorter release cycles (ten times a day if you really need that), to actually test your website in realistic conditions. If you're not convinced just look how the full the ASP.Net forums are from messages with title like "Everything was fine until I published my website!"

The second, maybe less obvious advantage, is that you (and your testers) have no restriction in your testing operations. Just go and try to corrupt the sandbox data by exploiting some potential bug, what do you risk? Not much. Check what's happen if add some wrongly encoded data in you website new publishing system. Etc ... The sandbox let you perform all the required testing operations without interfering with your visitors on the main website.

The third, certainly obscure, advantage is that if you do not have a sandbox, other people will use your primary website as a sandbox. This is especially true if you are exposing any kind of web interface (GET, POST, SOAP, XML-RPC, whatever) because people will use your website to debug their own code.

Connecting all sandboxes together

Some webmasters might hesitate in letting their sandbox worldwide accessible. Personnally, unless having a very good reaon I would strongly advise to do so (see third advantage, here above). What do you have to lose? Expose your bugs? That's precisely the purpose of the sandbox anyway. Moreover many professional websites already have their own public sandboxes.

For example, PeopleWords.com (online translation services) has links toward PayPal.com whereas sandbox.peoplewords.com relies on sandbox.paypal.com.

You can design your website in such a manner than your sandbox hyperlinks other sandboxes. Also the notion of sandboxing is not restricted to web pages, but includes web services too.

ASP tips

• The only difference between you real website and your sandbox is the content of the web.config file. If your website and sandbox differs by more than their configuration files, you should maybe consider refactoring your website because it means that your deployement relies on error-prone operations.


• Dupplicate you website logo into mylogo.png and mylogo-sandbox.png and include a LogoPath key in your web.config file to reference the image. The mylogo-sandbox.png image must include a very visible sandbox statement. By using distinct logos, you can later avoid possible confusions between the sandbox and the website.


• By convention, the sandbox is usually located into sandbox.mydomain.com or www.sandbox.mydomain.com.


• Do not forget to replicate the databases (but without including the actual content). You should not rely on the primary website database.