Update on Outlier Upgrades: Trust and Safety
Hi everyone, this is Outlier's community manager, posting from our official account. As many of you know, we've been actively connecting with you in this subreddit to learn more about your experiences, and a big topic as of late has been how we navigate account security and fraud prevention.
As part of our ongoing platform upgrade series, we want to share some of the latest improvements our team has been working on. Today's installment addresses a complex challenge that affects our entire contributor community: trust and safety.
The full text of the email announcement is posted below for your convenience.
Thank you for your patience and ongoing contributions as we work to create a more seamless and secure contributor experience.
Update on Outlier Upgrades: Trust and Safety
We are continuing to improve Outlier based on feedback from contributors like you. As part of an ongoing series of updates we are making to the platform, today we are sharing changes we have made to fight fraud and keep you safe.
Outlier offers convenient work and competitive pay rates to contributors from around the world. While this provides a great way to earn extra income, it also provides a target for bad actors willing to misrepresent their identity, location, or qualifications.
Fraud is bad for everyone, especially Outlier’s many thousands of legitimate contributors. If bad actors successfully manipulate their way onto projects, this can result in fewer tasks available for legitimate contributors, lower data quality that slows down projects, and a perception of easy money that attracts even more people looking to run the same play over and over.
Thankfully, Outlier’s Trust and Safety team works hard to detect and prevent these activities, and we have made tremendous progress in preventing and eliminating fraud on the platform. Below are some of the efforts the team has made to eliminate fraud and to help make sure that honest actors do not mistakenly caught by our fraud detection systems:
1. Enhanced contributor identity protection
- We now offer more ways to verify your identity, including different forms of ID and submitting selfies, giving you more convenient options to choose from.
- A new ID verification appeals process means you can quickly get human support if you are struggling to pass the verification process.
2. Additional self-help tools
- Our new travel logging system lets you request to work while outside your primary location without triggering our fraud detection systems. You can do this in the “Travel Requests” section of your Outlier profile, and these requests are typically approved within 72 hours. Please try to place your request prior to your travel to avoid being flagged in the system!
- We are rolling out new account protection features that let you provide additional information (like a LinkedIn account) to prove your identity, location, or credentials. This protects legitimate accounts by verifying information from multiple sources.
3. Resources to protect legitimate contributors
- We added two-factor verification steps anytime you change payment methods to help protect your account.
- Our fraud detection system now includes additional human review layers to improve accuracy, safety, and resolution speed. If you ever require fraud-related support, our team will work to get your account reviewed as quickly as possible.
While we have your attention, we want to note that we have also received reports of bad actors who have been impersonating Outlier personnel in order to steal your information. In response, we have created guidelines you can use to stay safe, which can be found by searching “Stay safe from scammers” in the Outlier help center.
If you have any feedback regarding this message or any additional areas for improvement, please contact us here.
Thank you for choosing to work on Outlier. Our efforts to improve your experience on the platform are ongoing, and we will continue to provide updates over the coming weeks.
Thank you,
The Outlier Team