On January 3, 2023, the anonymous volunteers behind the Translator Scammers Directory (TSD) shared their annual report of scammer activities in 2022.
TSD’s goal is to expose criminals who impersonate legitimate translators by stealing their CVs, possible work, and potential earnings.
The CV scam starts when scammers offer to “market” a professional translator’s CVs to clients, but then replace the translator’s contact information with their own.
To deliver some sort of product to a client, scammers typically run text through machine translation (MT) or commission a severely underpaid (or unpaid) translator to do the work.
While asking for some kind of documentation to prove the “translator’s” identity seems like reasonable due diligence, TSD warns that scammers can easily forge such documents.
“Video calls are the ultimate weapon against scammers,” counsels TSD. “You’ll hear the most amazing excuses: ‘bad connection,’ ‘broken camera,’ ‘I’m driving,’ ‘no camera,’ ‘I have a sore throat,’ ‘I don’t use chat for business, just email.’”
TSD, which has been online since 2014, currently maintains a database of more than 21,470 email addresses used by scammers.
Other databases track scammers’ profiles in translation portals (234 to date); fake CVs (5,927); and fake addresses (4,182).
Trends in CV Scams
According to the report, TSD has observed a steady increase of emails related to other scams targeting translators, such as…
