> It's such a cesspool of fraud now that I can't figure out how to find the honest people.

now? I've heard similar horror stories going back years. Perhaps you were lucky in that you got more positive than negative out of it earlier?

It's very possible I was lucky. I also only worked with people who were willing to appear on video, had long work history, and didn't do more than a single job at a time.

Recently I had thought that maybe prices had gone up, and I was just not paying enough for the honest, individual contractors, but even at $120+/hr, we were getting people misrepresenting their skills or trying to trick us with subcontractors.

The few success stories I've known from upwork have been people who managed to find one sharp person, then went direct with them ASAP, and left upwork behind.

the other side of that is Upwork exclude legit people for vague and often made up reasons, I tried to sign up as I was curious, almost instantly disabled for "fraud" - thought it was pretty funny, especially after seeing all the obviously bogus tenders etc

Seems like this can be solved with a quick address verification no?

How? And what would their address tell me?

it would be easy to tell apart real vs fake ones

It's very easy to fake an address and almost impossible to verify one.

I could verify your address for 60¢