暗网猎奇

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鈥淚 knew it was a scam 鈥� but I needed it to be real.鈥� Charlotte Hale-Burgess examines a growing problem

When I left a successful sales career to become a freelance translator, I brought with me a sense of purpose, excitement and the (potentially dangerous) need to prove myself. I had made a bold decision to follow a long-held passion and turn it into a career, and I was staring into the face of an unknown stretch sans salary. I was sure I had the skills and experience to build a business that worked for me, but the industry was new and I found a brick wall in the space where I鈥檇 imagined a mountain of job offers to be.

No matter how much professional experience you have, nothing prepares you for the quiet desperation that can creep in during those first uncertain months. You just need that first paid project and the proof that you made the right choice. So when the opportunity arrived 鈥� big project, suspiciously great rate, urgent deadline 鈥� I knew, somewhere deep down, that it wasn鈥檛 quite right. And I said yes anyway.

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The voice I ignored

I had set myself up on a few freelancing portals as per the usual advice, but perhaps a little too quickly. I hadn鈥檛 taken the time to understand how other professionals were putting themselves out there. And then I was contacted by someone who told me they had a project for me. Finally! The communication was off, sure, and the spelling and grammar were questionable, but I wrote that off as English not being their first language.

The contract they sent over was little more than a hastily thrown together Word document, and the email address was ambiguous. I searched for the business online and found almost nothing. I knew that wasn鈥檛 a good sign. But I also knew what I wanted this project to mean: the beginning. So I waved away the myriad red flags in front of me. Maybe they didn鈥檛 have a strong digital footprint. Maybe it really was an urgent project. In my previous job, I鈥檇 worked with lots of small companies that were not hugely tech savvy, so I ignored the hesitations, silenced the voice in the back of my head and told myself: this could be it.

What made it all the more disorienting was that the work itself was real. The text was detailed and nuanced, the kind of material I鈥檇 always hoped to work with 鈥� intellectually satisfying and full of linguistic challenges. I spent hours immersed in it, choosing words with care, consulting dictionaries and researching specialist terms to ensure accuracy. I wasn鈥檛 just delivering a service, I was building something with integrity.

And that鈥檚 what I keep returning to: the effort was genuine. I didn鈥檛 cut corners or take it as a test run. I treated it like the beginning of my professional identity in this new field. I poured my energy, training and focus into that document, thinking about how it might be part of my portfolio, how I鈥檇 speak about it to future clients. I believed, or at least convinced myself, that this was the start of something.

Even as I sent it off, a part of me still hoped for validation 鈥� a 鈥榯hank you鈥�, a note of appreciation and a prompt payment. It soon became clear, however, that that was not going to materialise. Sure, there was a certain payment dance