Unity Connect - A Great System for Scammers?

After getting my first Nigeran Scam from a Unity Connect applicant I was thinking that this system has a lot of features that make it desirable for scammers.

1) Its trivial to apply for many jobs.

2) The way you create your profile pages makes it easy to create a professional seeming portfolio that is hard to differentiate from a real portfolio.

3) (The big one for me) The way the application process is set up it requires the job poster to see and review a portfolio and to take actions by 'accepting and connecting' to the applicant.

2&3 make it easier for the scammer to build trust when no such trust is deserved.

Contrast this to a forum post where the first interaction is a hand crafted message. This requires the poster to reply to what you wrote and to tailor their approach to your specific requests. It makes it both harder for the scammers to reply and easier to pick the scammers at the first interaction (before any trust is built).

 

I made a private message of all scammers on here years ago, I would pass it around and it was VERY helpful. I think a rating system would work better like Upwork. It is kinda weird they do not support programmers... don't understand that logic.

 

Hey all,

Please report these people to us at connect_support@unity3d.com.

We have a lot of privacy & entitlement work upcoming that should generally allow for a better, safer messaging environment.

We have purposefully left the "rating" system off until there are actual transactions (doesn't have to be monetary) that we can capture on our site. Even then, we will focus on maintaining the privacy rights of the individual. Yes, a scammer would be rated 0.0 and would help you out, but what would your rating be? How would you fix it? The last thing we want to support is the dystopian idea where we have 2.2 ratings floating above our heads.

 

How many times do we have to repeat that message to you, Unity guys, before you add it there? It is so simple yet so needed. Not at the time of your misterious big update but now! I know you want to force us to use Unity Connect and that is why you closed Commercial [you are the boss here, you can do what you want I understand this] but it is not fair that you are not able to meet our basic requirements in real time and you force us to run our businesses on the platform in BETA stage.
What you are doing is driving freelancers away from Unity community. The opposite of "connect".

 

This reads as if actual transactions, monetary or otherwise , are coming to connect or a unity owned portal. Please officially comment?

 

Hello, are you still developing the game? It’s not easy for me to find your contact information