oDesk Scam Review Attack
Here at Tech Guys we occasionally need resources we don’t have. Or in some cases we need work done that is better suited for low skilled labor. Put another way- its hard to pay programmer wages for someone to sweep the floor. You can go out of business fast doing that.
Awhile back we had a situation where we need to do some data scraping for a marketing campaign we were running. The list we needed to target didn’t exist in a form where we could simply purchase it- we had to build it. We’re talking about a highly targeted group of about 1,000 people- not 100,000 or some massive project. At this point in time I had not heard about CrowdFlower.com (now Appen) so we used the old standby, odesk.com and just hired a temporary contractor to pull up the websites we were dealing with and copy/paste the information. The total job time was maybe 30 hours and in this particular situation we decided to do a test: find the cheapest odesk contractor that seemed qualified and see what we get. For less than $1.00/hr USD ($0.56/hr to be exact), we received some pretty solid work from an individual in Bangladesh. I was quite pleased with the work and in fact had a note to write a blog post about it- touching on the GDP differences and how far that $0.56/hr goes; Bangladesh’s per capita income is around $1000 USD/year.
However- today I discovered something quite interesting. We never clicked the button within odesk to end the contract with that individual and when one of the guys on the team setup the original request we didn’t put an end date on it either. This meant the contract was open ended. I’ve had open ended contractors on odesk before and never thought anything about it. However, this time around the contractor continued to sneak hours in after the project was done. And considering they were billing at only $0.56/hr- their hours went unnoticed.
When I dug into this today, I found out that the contractor had billed over $200 in fake hours- and within the work diary screenshots I even saw they were using a tool to fake their mouse movements and fool odesk into thinking they were working. (Auto Mouse was the tool- their trial of the software had expired, so it popped up on the screen demanding they pay for the full version- go figure.)
So- someone in Bangladesh earned 1/5 of their annual income by stealing from us. It’s not the loss of $200 that irritated me enough to write this post and share the experience, its the breach of integrity and trust.
I come from a small town in Indiana. New Paris to be exact. Trust was something that just was. It wasn’t a world of trying to one-up the neighbor, or steal when your buddy’s back is turned. In fact it was pretty simple- and included a lot of corn and soybeans. I chalk up my values to the economics and the way of life that America has created. I chalk it up to free markets, capitalism and the education thereof. Without a social structure that rewards those that contribute, anarchy exists- theft, extortion- an ugly world that causes one to look over their shoulder every day.
Bangladesh has been inhabited since the BC era- and continues to have unrest; particularly with freedom of expression. And why should those in power allow anyone to disagree with them? Its much easier to maintain power when you can just erase those that oppose you too loudly….
The country even recently banned YouTube access. YouTube really is a problem you know. It can mean education and ability to see what exists in the larger world. Unfortunately, education might just wake a few people up. People that would have remain enslaved. And the powers that be can’t have that.
I’d like to see Bangladesh emerge into a truly free country. But the effort has to come from within. External help doesn’t work if people won’t help themselves; and it starts with defining standards. Theft is still theft regardless of justification.
The irony is that I had it in my mind since the project was completed, that we should reach out to that person who did the work and give them more. In fact- if they had asked for minimum US wage for the data entry needs we had, I probably wouldn’t have even balked at it.