What Are The Best Ways To Protect Your goLance Account During The Pandemic?

Here’s the bitter truth about the pandemic. Not only our (real) world, but our cyberspace is affected by COVID-19, as well. The hackers have never been more active as they are right now. So, what can you do about it?

Our Support Team has prepared some useful security tips that can help you keep your goLance account secure and safe.

How To Detect A Fraud Scheme?

The best way of avoiding the most common fraud schemes is to learn how to detect them quickly and efficiently. Here’s some basic rules many users take for granted. You would be surprised how many fraud schemes can be easily avoided by following these three basic security rules:

1) Don’t Take Your Communication Outside The goLance Secure Chat

The goLance Chat makes it possible to send messages and make calls. There’s no need for you to communicate outside your goLance Chat. The first and most common attempt to fraud you begins with an invitation to take communication outside goLance. As long as you keep your communication within goLance Chat, you will be protected from the vast majority of scam attempts, plain and simple.

2) Don’t Send or Receive Money Outside goLance

Our payment protection system works only if you receive and/or send money through goLance. There are quite a few payment options available to goLance users. So, there’s no need to test your remote work luck by conducting financial transactions outside our platform.

3) Report All Red Flags Without Exceptions

If another user asks you to do something unusual, suspicious, or inappropriate, you should get in touch with our support team by reaching out to us at: support@golance.com. You can also flag a posted job or a user that’s conducting suspicious activities. We will take it from there and thoroughly investigate a potential fraud case.

If another user asks you to do one or more of the following, then there’s a high probability you’re dealing with a scammer:

• You’re required to pay a fee (even a symbolic one) to get a job or in order to begin working on your project. For example: a license, a site registration fees, an assurance deposit, a payment for a training kit, and similar.
• You’ve been asked to share your personal or sensitive information, such as your ID, account password, tax document, bank details, etc.
• You’ve been offered to send or receive funds outside goLance.
• You’ve been asked to share your contact information or communicate outside the goLance secure chat (via email, Skype, phone, and similar).
• You’ve been asked to start working before your contract is created.
• You’ve been asked to start working on a Fixed Cost contract without a previously funded milestone.
• You’re required to provide high-quality work samples or perform a quick unpaid job as a test.
• You’ve been invited to become a part of an illegal or unethical work activity.
• You’ve been invited to click on a suspicious link or to download a suspicious file. We recommend that you inform our support team about these suspicious links or analyze all received documents with your antivirus software.

How To Keep Your Account Safe?

Here are some tips that can help you keep your account safe. The most important thing is to keep the fraudsters away from your goLance account. Here’s how you can prevent an unauthorized access to your account:

• Choose a strong and unique password. Needless to say, in order to protect your account you shouldn’t share it.
• Enable the two-factor authentication by a text message (SMS) or by our app.
• Don't forget to log out of your session, especially if you have been using a public network to access your account.
• Our support team will send you an email notification, if we suspect that a suspicious activity is performed on your account. Pay attention to these notifications and contact our support team as soon as possible if it wasn’t you who initiated or authorized these operations.
• Check your GoWallet regularly in order to detect unauthorized transactions.
• If you are using our mobile app, don’t try to root or jailbreak your smartphone, use a mechanism to lock your phone automatically.

How To Keep Your Contracts Safe?

In order to provide a safe place where clients and freelancers can work together, goLance is helping you to secure your contracts with the following solutions:

1) Pay Attention To The goLance Feedback Score
Our star rating system allows you to check the total number of jobs completed by the user, including the feedback left by previous clients/contractors.

2) Use goMeter For Your Hourly Contracts
GoMeter is a useful and powerful time-tracking tool. It helps clients and freelancers keep track of the working progress. Please note that manually added hours are not covered by goLance protection.

3) Use The Milestone Funding Option For Your Fixed Price Contracts
To protect clients and freelancers, goLance offers the “fund a milestone” functionality. A milestone is created in a contract and it is paid to a goLance escrow account. GoLance will release the money to the freelancer only if and when the work is accomplished and the milestone is validated. More than one milestone can be added to a contract.

Important: In case of a dispute between a client and freelancer, the funds are held until the dispute is resolved.

4) Clients, Take The Time To Review Your Freelancer’s Work
The review period refers to five days after a work week is finished. During this time a client can examine their contractor's Work Diary to make sure all assigned tasks are accomplished as required. In case a client is unhappy with a contractor’s work or the activities reflected in the Work Diary, our support team is ready to act promptly and thoroughly investigate all elements. If you don’t take any action until the end of the review period, the work week will be finalized and you won’t be able to contest the payment.

5) Always Pay and Receive Money Through goLance
Again, if you want to count on our payment protection, all work-related payments have to go through our system.

The Final Word of Advice

There will always be potential security risks for both clients and freelancers. The pandemic has made us all being even more vulnerable to fraudulent activities. Those are the facts. This doesn’t mean that we can’t minimize the risks by working together and following these simple, but quite effective security measures and tips. Our support team is every client and freelancer’s best friend. So, let’s stay on alert and let’s do our best to keep our platform safe.