Beware of contractors outsourcing your projects (AppMechanic, Paramjot)

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1

Hello everyone, I initially didn’t want to make this topic but I was asked by a few guys to make others aware of it. I couldn’t find anywhere on the forums where I could post about scammers so decided to make a topic here.
MODs, you can move this topic to any appropriate location.

So basically, there is a person name Paramjot Singh https://forums.unrealengine.com/member.php?185163-Paramjot who uses multiple sources to get Game related jobs(mostly Unreal Engine 4) and outsource it a very cheaper price to other Unreal Engine 4 developers sometimes even 1/3rd the actual price. He doesn’t inform the developer that he is hiring a 3rd party person to work on the task or the client that their work has been outsources and the amount he is actually taking.

Few months back I had hired him over upwork, this account Upwork Freelancer
And while going through a fb group Facebook Groups, i found the exact details of my job being posted there, I tried to reach for the person who might have worked on the task and found out that he had hired the person only for 8$ per hour while he had charged me for 24$.

Later while browsing through the forums, i found out other posts where he was looking for jobs that had been just posted over upwork.
And he deleted all the forum posts when being approached about outsourcing the task. Although for the time the post was on forums, I was approached by multiple developers about working for him without knowing him to be a contractor.

I had asked the MOD to restore the post so others could be aware of it. But he again deleted it immediately.

Later when I asked upwork about it, they replied that action has been taken on the profile. Upwork Freelancer
I don’t know the exact action but I think the profile is banned and I am not able to search him over upwork anymore.

Currently he made another id here on the forums to try to get jobs.

Also he admitted on this post about outsourcing. But in reality Arun Kumar is a fake person probably his friend whose ID he has been using to get jobs and oursource them.

Although a good thing about him posting on forums is I found out the current upwork id he has been using.
https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01dfee1333369f1505/

I had a discussion with this person over upwork some weeks back and I didn’t notice anything off until I found out some portfolio items on his and Arun’s portfolio on forums were the same. I dug a little further on Facebook and found out that they both were on friend list. So I assume he is also using his another friends ID since original id Arun Kumar got locked.

I am not providing any facebook id links since it might not correct for privacy reason. And I didn’t want any personal attacks on the person. But I wanted to post this to make the developers and the clients about the kind of scams going on our community.
But yeah, do check the forum links if you can before the person deletes them.

So yeah, if you worked for this person or gave him any tasks, you have been cheated really badly.

2

Personally, I don’t see how this makes him a scammer automatically? You negotiated with the person and came to a deal meaning both parties agreeing to what they are getting and for what price (Both are happy with the terms and conditions). Did he not deliver on your deal? From the information provided above it sounds like you’re only unhappy now because you found out you can actually get it for a cheaper price, but isn’t that how all retail businesses work in general?

People normally have their sources where they can get something for cheaper and sell at a higher price for profit, so it sounds like the person is only doing something that is standard practice in business. All businessmen do the same thing to be perfectly honest. I don’t think outsourcing in itself is considered to be a scam.

So my point is, what makes you feel like it’s a scam other than that? Did he suddenly change the price after both of you agreed? Did he not deliver on what he promised, etc?

3

Well this is mostly to make others aware of the issue. I had been asked by a few other forum members to post this who also worked for him.
Secondly my code which I had asked him to write was written by 2 developers(Obviously both hired by him and both were really different. When I am paying the same programmer to do the task, I want the code to be uniform not something unworkable after that.

And when I tried to approaching him, his upwork profile has been banned and I couldn’t hire him. The exact one he is advertising. No other programmer wanted to work on the mess that was left and I had to start the work from scratch.

So yes although the thing itself is not scamming, its still against upwork policy since he is not referring himself as a company. And not the current business practice to delete every post on forum rather than admitting what he is exactly doing.

4

I see, thanks that makes the picture a whole lot clearer.

You’re also right, it’s not very good business practice to delete posts and hide (behavior characteristic of a scammer). I’d be better for his reputation if he tackles the issues in a better manner. You can’t always say if a business deal will turn out good or bad but reputable people will never hide from their responsibilities.

5

I happen to know this guy and a lot of other agencies / people who work on the same idea that they’ll advertise themselves as “devs” but in reality are just outsourcing the work they get to other people.

6

not the sort of thing i like see-ing but it happens all the time in real life not just game dev’s

the only “legal” point is if the guy doesn’t post that he’s the agency.

personnally i believe all agencies should be banned but thats never going to happen.

7

It is called subcontracting which is entirely legal. It does make it more difficult to get consistent quality work and therefore good for people to be aware of this individual, but one cannot claim being scammed or cheated because a project was outsourced.

I’d more worry about hiring people internationally based off of hourly rates. When I cannot monitor the work of the individual, I am not willing to pay hourly.

8

What about the project rights? I make them sign a contract that they are not allowed to share the project files with any one. Supposedly he shared my project files and some other person and he release it as his game or uses my files in his project, so whose fault would it be?

Any one that being said there is no problem with agencies, because we exactly know what we are getting. but an agency faking itself to be a single developer who doesn’t exists would be a problem.

9

The value he adds is project management, and the management of the cheaper sources.
As long as you are happy with what he delivers to you at the rates/cost you expect, what’s the problem?
That being said – if you’re worried about details of projects being leaked, then you should have your contractors sign NDAs, and if you find your details on the interwebs after the NDA, you have some legal recourse (which will be pretty expensive to actually apply, of course.)

10

Personally I would be a bit distraught if that is how a contractor I hired conducted business, without my knowledge. If I hire someone, it is because of their qualifications, community standing, and whatever else. Not the qualifications of a sub-contractor, who I don’t even know is in the picture.

11

Well it depends if its a big project that requires managing then its fine. But this is a task for a single programmer.

Secondly I am hiring the skills of the guy that doesn’t exist. I am don’t know who is working on it. And my code needs to be extended and worked on at a later point.

12

There a few things wrong about this:

  1. The client hired the guy on the basis of skills and portfolio he listed, but in reality the contractor doesn’t has any of those skills as they were of anonymous workers he hired in the past. So that’s straight away a deception or lie there. This means the jobs that would’ve been taken up by a legitimate talented individual would be taken up by this contractor because of the deception.

  2. Not everyone is happy about having their project sub-contracted to third party without their knowledge, most contracts specifically have it stated. At this point it’d be nearly impossible to trust the contractor to respect the NDA, given that he’s an offshore party in India, legal proceedings would be tremendously costly and waste of time due to international barriers in the laws. This guy probably knows about it which is why he keeps making one fake profile after another as there cannot be any feasible legal proceedings against it.

  3. As for the argument of project management I’d say I won’t ever want my project managed by somebody who knowingly refuses to identify himself ,knowingly deceives clients and presents himself to be an organisation instead of an individual and lies about the skills he possess. Also its not project management that client hired him for instead he was hired as an individual programmer/worker which means the project management is somebody else’s task. So this is a bad argument to defend him.

  4. Finally if the project fails for any reason the client and the third party worker might suffer most. The client might not get his work and the worker might not get paid while the contractor can just go into hiding and pop-up with another fake name later. The contractor is not putting anything at the stake as even his portfolio is made up of work done by other people , so it’d not harm him to lose it as he hadn’t spent any considerable effort to earn it in the first place.

In the end if the contractor works legitimately in the market then there’s nothing wrong.

  1. He should Identify himself with his real name, atleast to the clients
  2. Make it clear that he’s a contractor and has a legal license to conduct business
  3. Make it known to the worker that he’s hiring him for a subcontract, main contract may not be disclosed
13

Don’t hire random people on the internet to work on things that takes longer than a week to finish; it’s that simple…
If there’s no way to effectively trust someone, just don’t do it. Find someone physically closer to you.

On the other side, good luck making a professional signing silly NDAs for your startup, I personally will never sign NDA unless there’s permanent job offer contract attached… unless you’re Microsoft / Sony.
I mean, the only thing I sign is a paper that guarantees the client has absolutely all the rights to do whatever they want with the resulting product, nothing more. Although I don’t even add them to my homepage anyways, simply as a matter of mutual respect.

Btw, this kind of topic ALWAYS becomes a mess and should be closed :wink:

14

I concur in that the problem is to trust random people that you hire for a longer period than a weeks worth. Signing papers like NDA only is effective on the higher level of a company. As a start-up you don’t have an resources to defend it, especially in other countries too. So people shouldn’t but so much effort on that.

For myself I would never let anyone get repository access to the main product unless I know more about them in person, or they get a full time contract. So I would only outsource parts that can be made in seclusion and later imported/added to the main project by in-house staff.

In all other cases you are on a slippery rope and can’t trust anyone about anything :slight_smile:

15

The Arun guy on his portfolio mentions that he worked for my company. I checked the freelancers list of my company and didn’t find that we hired anyone named Arun in the last 2 years. So I am not sure how this would go…

I tried to ask him which project he worked on with my company but he is not replying me.

17

He won’t coz there isn’t a arun , its a fake name he uses to hide behind. He probably put up somebody else to work for you at the 10% of the rate you paid him and without letting that poor dev reveal himself, seriously this guy is quite cheap scammer. Keep an eye out as he might just pop back up with a different name