I patched my Slack client to keep “oops” messages others delete
I hired a contractor on Upwork once and he worked alongside us in our Slack workspace. He did great work for a few weeks and then I suspected him of outsourcing his persona to someone else. The smoking gun was that the presumed guy behind the scenes sent a PayPal invoice via his Slack account and immediately deleted it. I have regretted not having fast enough fingers since then and wish I had this.<p>I did end up catching him- the app he was working on enabled geolocation and he went from Chatanooga, Tennessee to Romania in an hour. I&#x27;m surprised he accepted geolocation! I also later confirmed IP addresses via Firebase deployments in the same region.<p>EDIT: since a lot of people are commenting saying that this is fine by IRS laws of subcontracting etc I should clarify:<p>1. This wasn&#x27;t a legal matter, but a business matter. I needed to federate access to sensitive infrastructure for this project, and this person failed to disclose (or denied) any additional involvement.<p>2. The work was not up to spec which is why there was a problem.<p>3. The reason for using a 1099 as opposed to a w2 in this case had nothing to do with trying to flout benefit obligations. I don&#x27;t think saying you need to know who&#x27;s touching your codebase and hiring someone on a contract basis is trying to have your cake and eat it too. This type of contract is much more expensive for us than a full-time employee.