Chris Horne

Chris is a senior leader in Trust and Safety, Marketplace Fraud, and Physical Security, with 30 years + experience spanning private enterprise and public sector investigations across the globe. At Upwork, he directs global teams responsible for fraud detection, identity risk, AML compliance, and emerging threat intelligence, safeguarding the world's largest digital work marketplace from sophisticated bad actors and evolving abuse tactics. He also serves as Head of Physical Security, bringing a unified approach to both digital and physical risk.

His strategic, intelligence-led philosophy combines advanced analytics with operational discipline to anticipate, detect, and disrupt fraud at scale through AI and agentic capabilities. His work is grounded in proactive risk frameworks, cross-industry collaboration, and adaptive responses to AI-driven, bot enabled attacks, and systemic abuse.

Chris began his career as a Detective with the UK's Metropolitan Police Service, conducting high-impact international investigations including cases involving child homicide and child sexual abuse material. He subsequently led large-scale security, distribution and loss prevention programs in Fortune 500 environments and Global Ethics & Compliance Investigations before joining Upwork.

Chris speaks regularly at leading industry events on the future of marketplace security, fraud trends, and resilient trust frameworks. He has presented at the RSA Conference, UK Trust and Safety Summit, and Marketplace Risk, and was an invited subject matter expert at the United Nations on the global impact of the DPRK IT worker scheme.