Upwork just stole $10k from me | Hacker News Reader

Upwork just stole $10k from me

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342 pointsdustedcodes130 comments

Welcome to HN where we provide support after large corporations fail to do basic due diligence.

A moderator replied to me a couple months ago that these kinds of posts are usually penalized so HN doesn’t become a support site, but I still see them quite often on here on the front page. I had been commenting that when such posts are made for YC companies, they rarely make it to the front page.

> there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads

I’m guessing that Upwork is not a YC company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816

It is also the middle of the night where HN mods usually live (USA).

Good morning dang! Happy Saturday. :(

I guess he woke up because this quickly dropped to the fifth page!

Maybe for smaller YC companies, but this story on Stripe got 1624 points, which meant it was probably on the frontpage for multiple days, and inside they say they only brought it up because someone else mentioned having a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

The number of upvotes is not a reflection of whether or not it was on the front page, but maybe that one was. But the post linked above (about Airbnb) had received a couple hundred of votes in less than one hour, but was not on the front page due to moderation (confirmed by the moderator), while most posts with that level of votes in such a short time would be very near the top of the front page.

Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations.

I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the hope that if I suddenly lose my XYZ account I will be able to get redress through the same avenue.

I think the fear is that you'll see a lot more of them in the future if they're allowed.

The hope (generally unjustified) is that corporations will feel shame about their practices, or perhaps more realistically that people will decide not to use their services or work for them.

Without these there's also not as much to counter survivor bias in the stories/recipes of successful use of rental economy, freemium services, etc.

> Personally, I see it as a benefit to be part of a community that can help in these situations.

The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed.

If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines.

If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus.

If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings.

I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.

But at least when posts about major tech companies' customer service fiascos show up here, there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better.

If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not.

Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.

> there is the opportunity to discuss it and shame them into doing better.

The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork.

> If these kinds of posts are disallowed here

I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out.

> Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.

It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.

I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.

> I don't think anyone believes on a societal level that HN support is a fix. But at the moment it is the only fix and I would bet it will not get much better.

My comment isn't exclusive to HN - it's a much more widespread issue on many social media platforms.

> I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.

I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.

Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system. It seems like we do better when we can put a face and a story to a problem.

> I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.

I agree and I'll never say that people trying to solve these kinds of problems on social media networks is deplorable or pass judgement on them. I've been there. I know very well what it's like to be screwed by a large company because they doubt you'll have the reach to spread the word.

> Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system

That seems very inaccurate, sadly. Most of these systems have closed loops where our ramblings are never integrated into the loop. My impression is that usually at best someone goes into said systems and marks it as "manual" to take it out of the system then resolves it. I imagine there are many cases where the system continues completely untouched and it's "verdict" is considered by the internal models to still be valid and the company simply cuts a check or whatever is required to brush the problem under the rug.

I don't really think its normalizing anything, this is unfortunately a pretty consistent pattern with the wider world. Kinda seems unrealistic to think HN or twitter could be better than the environment they're within.

People "deserve" things in our world for far far more arbitrary reasons than what you give here unfortunately.

> the magical sequence of fellow accounts

You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.

> if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment

This still beats "XYZ group" - in this case, someone who is

> stressed about the situation and being without electricity due to the war

being ignored by us as well as by the company that's meant to be the middleman (to clients who had no issue paying them directly - so clearly a problem with UW and not any other party)

> I "deserve" to get screwed

No one does, which is the point. Highlighting when companies' customer service fails users (and how they deal with it - sweeping the pattern under the rug versus resolving to address it) helps people make informed decisions about the companies they do or don't choose to work with.

While 'anecdata', it's still a more far useful metric to me than advertising in picking who I support, as patterns tend to arise (both positive and negative!) resulting from a company's culture.

> You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.

I don't need to be well connected or have some arbitrary requirement of being "enough" of a community member to get basic recourse in other venues. In most other cases of our lives for these kinds of basic disputes you can rely on a combination of local laws, police and small claims courts.

I agree with most of your other points overall. My complaint isn't to say we shouldn't be raising an issue, it's really more about the way we act like the problem is solved once the giant fire no longer is roaring but there are still embers that eventually reignite.

yup, if there was going to be one place to do this, HN would be a good one

maybe a Help HN! subsection could be created?

where people who work for the companies users need support from could gain +25 karma for helping out, or something

We moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-related startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

It actually works in the opposite direction: we moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC startups are the story. Lots of past explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

That said, customer-support-of-last-resort threads have been so repetitive lately that we started downweighting them more in general.

I was going to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 and then I saw that it was the reply I posted to you last time! Nothing has changed since then.

Any chance for a dedicated section?

Do you mean would we add a dedicated section on HN for 3rd party customer support issues? That's a legit question.

This is when it's particularly helpful to have only one thing we're optimizing for [1] because it means we can replace that question with another: would it make HN more intellectually interesting? The answer is clearly no, I think, because those threads tend to be so repetitive.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Knowing which company, that your live depends on, know how to make things right is crucial knowledge - thus the popularity of those threads IMO. When years of your life gets deleted in seconds, and the company starts ignoring you, that's the red flag that needs to be public. I'm not advocating for separate section, but the public have spoken - the popularity of those threads means it's crucial part of this community.

That's not how HN works. If it did, then the front page would be filled with sensationalism and rage and the same few hot topics repeated over and over—because those tend to get the most upvotes.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

It also serves as a warning for others, and not just Upwork. Think and check before committing sizeable resources.

Keeping us humble

I'm interested in this post and others like it, not because of one person's story, but because it tells me something about a company's way to handle customer support, fraud detection and prevention and more.

> but because it tells me something about a company's way to handle customer support, fraud detection and prevention and more.

I agree as long as that takes into account the fact that their system failed enough to warrant needing to go to HN in the first place. All too often we see something like this blow up on HN, get "resolved" and then the takeaway is "oh, I guess XYZ company really handles stuff" when in reality there are probably hundreds or thousands of other cases that weren't fortunate to get to the front page of HN to bubble up out of the AI support hell.

Sure, but how can you be sure that the takeaway is a „good“ one now? Maybe the author of this thread was ill intended, left out important details etc. Stories like these are really hard to assess without some more research.

When I say it tells me something, I mean I get a first impression. I do not get a significant amount of information to have a settled opinion.

One of the reasons that criminal acts are criminal is that they destroy value. For example, when metal prices go up, criminals steal wires from railway lines. This gains them a couple of hundred bucks of metal, and costs tens of thousands in disruption and reinstallation.

This kind of action by companies should be criminal, because they just destroyed economic activity worth at least $10000, because they didn't want to spend a little more on due diligence. Which could even have been put up as a bond by their client. My guess is that it would have cost <1 hour's work to validate this guy, and obviously he would rather bond that than lost the $10000. But no.

I would expect that to be illegal already in most jurisdictions. I believe in Germany you could argue it constitutes fraud. Either the client received the work and it’s fine, then the contractor is owed payment for the work. Or the client did not receive the work, then they are owed the payment that they made. Upwork permanently keeping the money from both sides is almost certainly not an option. They might be permitted to keep the funds temporarily while they seek a resolution, but that should have a clear threshold.

The problem is fighting it; in Germany this would cost quite a bit, even if you win. It should be a protection that if you cannot talk to a human who has mandate, you get your money back.

If you prevail in Germany, most of the costs are placed on the loosing party. It’s still a problem, but in a case as such, I would hand it off to a lawyer and see where it goes. The bigger issue here is likely that the upwork terms of service stipulate a court in the US, and that will be hard to pursue.

Agreed, but as someone who had lawsuits in DE, the loser pays a nominal fees (I do not know what they are now, but they have to pay hours * nominal fee, not your actual lawyer bill) for the court costs, not the actual costs. If you have a good, which often means expensive, lawyer, you won’t recoup the costs if you win unless a fine is imposed on the other party.

But yes, jurisdiction is an issue, however damage can be done; they don’t want to lose EU and these are violations of our laws so they should be hit hard.

The costs paid are based on the “Streitwert” which in this case would likely be the 10k. There’s tables to look up the lawyer fee and the court fee. A good lawyer may demand more, but you’re still likely to come out ahead if you win.

You’ll likely also be awarded interest and the court-appointed interest rates are nothing to sneeze at (they’re based on the banks base interest rate plus a few percent)

Edit: went and looked it up: Interest is applied from the point when the defendant received the court papers and is currently the base rate plus 5 or 9 percent points.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__291.html

> If you prevail in Germany, most of the costs are placed on the loosing party. It’s still a problem, but in a case as such, I would hand it off to a lawyer and see where it goes.

All this means is that the losing party must reimburse your costs. Your lawyer is going to ask for money while the case is ongoing. So you need to have some serious money in advance.

Serious money is relative: Standard fees in this case would be around 1850 EUR including relevant taxes, but only if it goes to court. Depending on the complexity of the case, your lawyer may ask for more, but that you’ll need to have with your lawyer. Also, legal insurance exists - if you’re doing serious business you should either have that or set aside some money for legal representation - or be prepared to just fold in those cases.

There’s a reason why that Rechtsschutz is up to €3m.

Yeah, I would hope so. But I mean in the more general case. If google closes your account with no recourse, they don't make any money from doing so, but if you bought into their marketing and relied on them, then you lose a lot of value. Companies encourage tens of thousands of consumers and businesses to rely on them, should be required to be able to be held to account by those they have led to rely on them.

Google loses money if they need to figure out whether account closing should be done or not.

For Google to make profit, they can just close your account and not hire humans and train them with enough internal organisation knowledge to politely and humanly handle these issues.

Better profit is to have automated/AI based system that closes accounts based some user reporting - which can be easily gamed.

A real user, who is going to lose a lot of value, would be willing to put up the minimal amount of money necessary to have google investigate properly. But google would rather destroy value than be accountable.

Arbitrary bans and deletions are illegal under German law and are open to legal recourse in Germany. A ban must be based on a violation of ToS or law and if the case goes to court, google would need to substantiate that. And even if there’s a violation of the ToS, the court may rule the ToS invalid or require a warning before a complete ban. These cases usually don’t make it to court though, often a sternly written Fax from a lawyer will result in unbanning.

Quickbooks has taken almost $2000 of money, that my client paid for work done, for more than a year now.

I registered for, and received the payment through, their merchant account, but later found out I did not qualify for it since I was not in the US. I understand if their fraud detection systems flagged something, but all they needed to do was to talk to the client and verify that it was a legitimate payment.

They have refused to release the money to me, or to send it back to the client. They also disabled all my Intuit accounts, some of which I had paid a subscription for.

Likely a similar situation - either you or your client would be entitled to the money, but enforcement is impossible because of the prohibitive costs.

We have a few clients in the US and I’m always factoring in this issue when making contracts with them. If they decide to not pay a small to medium sum, collecting it will be impossible most of the time if they don’t have a subsidiary in Germany.

Any AI or automated process where money is involved , any invalid action (deemed so by a human arbitrar) should be punished extremely hard, for any company. Gdpr hard; simply costing a % of the revenue if it turns out wrong and if the process was not reviewed and discussed with an actual human. We cannot just let this go on.

> One of the reasons that criminal acts are criminal is that they destroy value.

Yes, and this is a complete tangent from your main point, but I worry about over-using the justification of destroying "value" versus destroying other people's "property." Not all things that "destroy value" are or should be criminal.

My favorite example: I own the only gas station on a busy corner and sell gas for $5 a gallon. My gas station is worth $1 million because of its money-making ability. Someone else opens a new gas station on the opposite corner and sells gas for $4 a gallon. My revenue drops, and the "value" of my gas station falls to $0.5 million. The competitor "destroyed value." Yet that's not only not criminal, but it's exactly the kind of competitive behavior a free society needs.

I don't understand why all of these replies from the big companies come with something like "we are not able to revert this decision" somewhere in the text. It shows such an arrogance!

That was my first thought. Why can't they admit that they messed up. Total arrogance

I can't see how it does not make some lawmakers eyes glow.

"1M of fines say you will"

Upwork is a hellish abomination of a company. I did some contracting for them cca 7 years ago.

It all started with a final meeting with the CEO - the bald Greek guy with the same first name as me, who spent almost an hour of his (not so) invaluable time for the sole purpose of pushing me to drop my rate from $45/h to $40/h. Ultimately we agreed, but on the condition that it is a 20h/week assignment, so that I have time for properly paid work.

3 weeks later I got fired for only doing 30h/week. Even back in the day, when I first read the e-mail I chuckled :D :D :D

Oh cool story!

Same guy posted a nasty review on my profile (like as if he was a client) after I refused to install the tracking software which was only mentioned in the on-boarding document and never during the interview process.

I only learned about it a few years later when I wanted to use my profile and realized it had a negative review. I couldn’t remember at all even doing any jobs.

I emailed support and they accidentally spilled the beans. They said “do you remember working with so and so.” I couldn’t even remember. Google the name. Oh, it’s CEO/CTO of upwork. Great!

This was circa 2011 I’d guess, just when they were rebranding from oDesk to Upwork and rewriting lots of Perl, which I was big into back then.

>Provided the documents, went through the visual verification with a webcam, answered the questions, and solved the programming task live, ...

Excuse me, WTF? You have to code something in order to get verified? (!)

When I did it it was form questions like how to do an SQL join. The questions were not related at all to the work you were trying to do.

Fortunately my experience was just me talking about skills I'd listed I had experience with for maybe a minute or less. All on camera while I couldn't see them of course.

I have already heard of one story close to me of a company that had to fire someone because they faked their interview coding assignment.

I have had a CBP officer asking me very light questions around python.

Fraud is likely a huge issue on Upwork

- Set up fake profile

- Set up a bot army to vote you up

- Take clients money, never deliver or deliver some random crap duct taped together with ChatGPT README

If clients keep paying it means they are happy with the work delivered.

But if upwork really wants to implement coding tests they have to do it BEFORE assigning customers to the developer. Especially before $10K have been spent.

Do they do coding test? I have not heard that before.

There are blackhat hacking forums with a better reputation and fraud protection system than Upwork. If all it takes is a “bot army” to make a profile seem legit, they’ve created this problem for themselves.

> - Take clients money

This part is usually solved with escrow systems so the scammer wouldn't get anything until the client confirms they're happy, so why isn't that what Upwork is doing?

They did that to me when I was fresh out of high school . Did some js/html fixes for a few days for some guy and got $200. A few weeks later, original hirer charges back Upwork (I contacted him and he told me it was a different work that wasn't delivered by the other person). Upwork goes into damage control and sweeps my entire balance and tells me it is part of their policy. They claimed they would return it if they won the charge back claim.

Never went back.

And they didn't refund the client either according to the tweets author... Nice business model.

I had a large sum of money scammed from my credit card a few weeks ago - a single transaction to Upwork. I'd never heard of them before this month.

I know it's not the same issue, and the creds obviously came from somewhere else, but the amount of fishy reports I found just searching them here on Hacker News means I will never go near them.

It’s possibly related, however.

The likely cause for their ban is going to be KYC getting around to review and money laundering regs/insurers demanding a certain course of action - cessation and seizure, possibly a report to relevant LE.

Platforms like eBay and upwork - anything where there’s a transfer of money between two third parties - have an enormous duty of responsibility around laundering and fraud, and even the slightest suspicion will result in a ban.

Result in a ban and just keep that amount of money? They have to deliver it somewhere, so that both of the affected sites can clarify, object.. or at least learn and understand what this is about??

They generally don't 'seize' the money... They 'freeze' the money...

And then won't release it without a court order.

However it is typically pretty easy to get a court order, because they won't fight against you in court. They just want a court to tell them to release the money, because then any money laundering isn't their fault - they're just doing what the court asked.

Getting a court order can be hard, if the court has any reasonable doubt, and you end up with them treating the freeze as grounds for reasonable doubt and then require absurd degrees of evidence to the contrary. It’s particularly hard if you’re based somewhere tricky, and the court wants you in London, in person, next Tuesday.

No. They hold onto it precisely so that no involved parties have any clue what just happened, and to allow LE time to act if necessary. If the parties are proven innocent, then monies are returned, but that usually requires a party to lawyer up.

I’ve seen it happen, with bank accounts, and sizeable sums of legitimately obtained money. HSBC sat on several million dollars of a friend’s business for two years - they couldn’t make payroll etc., and resultantly folded. They ultimately got their money back, but it took a fortune in lawyers, court visits, etc.

What's the best approach for suing US companies if you're not in the US? I doubt the effort to bring an international case will be worth it for $10k. Can you easily sue in the US as a non-citizen + non-resident? Can you expect one of those outrageously high verdicts so that lawyers might take your case for a cut of the winnings if they believe they have a good chance to either win or settle?

For $10K there is no solution and companies know that. That's why it is becoming a big risk.

> $10K there is no solution and companies know that

Arbitration.

Unfortunately, it’s getting easier for companies to replace mandatory consumer arbitration with liability caps (or get folks to opt out of arb), which leaves one SOL.

I think a US lawyer would charge about $200-300 for a formal letter. Could be enough to solve the issue.

In unrelated topic, I always found the HN ranking algorithm hard to understand but this time, it is of another level. This story was ranked No.6 with 170 pts and 44 comments then I entered the comments’s section, spent just a few minutes, return back.. bum! It just disappeared from not the front page nor the 2nd neither the 3rd, it is in the 4th page, ranked 107 with 269 pts and 96 comments.

Someone manually flagged the post.

The crazy thing with these companies are they say you violated the user agreement but doesn't mention what specific policy you violated.

Can't comment on this case, but I used to work for a company that did similar verifications.

The omission of the exact reason is intentional - as an example, I distinctly remember seeing the same mistake appearing on photoshoped passport scans over and over again. If the exact reason would be told, bad actors could exploit it more easily.

With that said, this policy also causes false positives. The goal is to exclude as many bad actors as possible, while minimizing the number of false positives. But there will be always false positives unfortunately.

> The omission of the exact reason is intentional - as an example, I distinctly remember seeing the same mistake appearing on photoshoped passport scans over and over again. If the exact reason would be told, bad actors could exploit it more easily.

Yes. We get it. And without doing that companies like upwork would have it prohibitively expensive to stay in business. And maybe for a good reason. That’s exactly the difference between any semi-large consulting agency and something like upwork. The former has people on payroll who can vet the client and the supplier, but due to that, there’s only so much business they can turn around. And then there are those companies like upwork who pride themselves with shit like “how we support 50k suppliers per one support staff member” (I came up with this particular one but it’s pretty reasonable for that to happen).

I mean, come on, it’s like your local traffic law enforcement agency sent you a letter:

Your driver’s license is now suspended and we are sorry to inform you that you have no recourse, you can never ever drive again. We cannot tell you why. All communication from you will be ignored. G’day.

Same, no? How the f** is that legal. The fraud is NOT my problem, it’s upworks problem. Get us on a level playing field. Provide a method for your client and supplier to sort it out using a transparent legal path. Same with google, facebook, twitter, whatever. And if the company cannot provide that, well, maybe their business is dubious. They can ruin you on a whim! And you have no recourse!

Kinda the same with Twitter (and likely Facebook) bans.

You did something against our terms and now you're banned. We will not tell you what was the offending Tweet though ...

I was hoping Elon Musk would change this, but I don't believe anything changed regarding this issue yet. I think there's probably some legal reasons why companies follow this approach.

Guilty with no way to prove innocence.

I've often been asked by clients to bypass paying via these platforms. They don't like it as much as the developers. Let's face it, the resolution here of clients now having to withdraw out of Upwork, only to be able to pay you out of bounds is bonkers.

I am hitting up Upwork support as I hire a fair bit through them and see if I can do anything. Such BS.

This is very serious. As these platform become bigger and bigger they become difficult to avoid for customers and workers.

Either a company would need to be extremely diligent about fixing workflow exceptions or they would be overwhelmed by the cost of support, especially across countries.

And I used to work for a bank which took years to put password reset online, despite it being 25% of support calls. And we only operated in one province.

Companies would need to fundamentally change their cultures to fix this kind of issue as often the team doing the dev isn’t even aware of the support issues it creates.

Nobody on the IT team even knew password reset was 1/4 of support.

> they would be overwhelmed by the cost of support

Yes, of cause? If you can't pay for the support you need to provide then you need to raise prices. Imagine a logistics company complaining that they would be overwhelmed by the cost of fuel.

But of cause Upworks has no benefit to raising prices for their services, as that would make competition harder.

A logistics company that didn’t pay for fuel wouldn’t have any customers. Upwork can keep most customers without support.

If a logistics company most of the time didn’t need to buy fuel and sometimes just didn’t deliver if it required too much fuel, plenty of people would still use it if it were cheap.

It's not a free product. This transaction is over $10K. Users (developers and clients) deserve customer support for this kind of transaction.

Your whole post is absurdly apologetic. Stealing $10K from the customers is plain criminal. It does take "extreme diligence" not to do so.

There must be some sort of arbitration in the terms. They must be able to apply for that.

We've used Upwork to find contractors in the past. I will strongly recommend avoiding Upwork to my managers.

As a client, what are my alternatives to Upwork?

Fiver?

Nitpick, but I think you mean Fiverr rather than Fiver.

There's also:

- PeoplePerHour.co.uk (UK based, not sure of international presence)

- Freelancer.com

- Toptal (but I think they have some sort of approval process that may be a bit arduous)

- Guru.com

- Codeable.io

- Outsourcely.com

- Truelancer.com

- Konker

- Servicescape

- Solidgig (but stronger for design and marketing/SEO roles, I think - considered dropping into the category below)

- Hubstaff Talent

- FlexJobs (but more oriented toward IT and accounting than software development; again, considered dropping into the more specalised category below)

Additional specialist companies I'm aware of that target roles other than developers:

- 99Designs (for, you guessed it, designers and UX) - https://99designs.co.uk/

- Savio (market researchers) - https://savio.pro/

- F-LEX (legal) - https://flex.legal/

Hope you manage to pick up more work soon, but also that you manage to get yours and your clients money back from Upwork.

To mention, none of these are like Upwork. I've tried them all, and they don't really have competition that makes it as easy as Upwork to find and hire someone.

Freelancer.com is the nearest. The rest are doing very diff models. TopTal doesn't even belong on a comparison list.

For the uninitiated, mind explaining why TopTal (and the rest) don't look at all the same?

You go through an addmission process that's pretty much similar to an employement process (several interviews, technical interviews, tests etc).

After you get in, most of the jobs you get are strongly limited to your particular skill (so you won't be able to see what coding jobs are available if you're a designer).

Then, the customer aquisition process is slightly different, as you don't talk straight to the client while you're „bidding”, but with a recruiter, who deals with selecting the right candidate for a job.

Finally, for most of the jobs you don't even have to _apply_, as recruiters constantly send you messages for potential jobs.

Now, upwork & freelancer are mostly a race to the bottom; I personally got banned from upwork for having the audacity to apply to jobs and not winning any (because I didn't wanted to work for peanuts).

Wow, they banned you for that? Curious to hear the full story!

The short version: I was working on and off on upwork for the past... 10 years or so (since they were called elance). Didn't had too many projects (less than 20) and only applying there only for very small gigs, when I had some breaks from my regular clients (a couple of times per year).

Some years ago, one of my client went out of business and I wanted to give upwork a serious go, as I already had _some_ projects there, the account was verified and such.

Start applying on jobs that matched my skill set, asking for my regular hourly rate (hence the audacity). Looking backward, my requested rate wasn't even that high, but that's a story for another time. :)

Dunno how they work now, but back then they had a certain amount of credits every month that you could use to apply to jobs. IIRC, you could apply to 10-15 jobs every month with those credits.

Which I did.

I applied to about ten jobs, on most didn't had any replies from the client (they either closed the job or picked someone else), but the gist is that I didn't get any job.

One day, I get an email where the gist was: you weren't able to get any clients with your credits, so we don't need you. Same as OP, tried to contact them, but the decision was final and that's that. Fortunately, I didn't loose anything but some internet points :)

Crazy, thanks for sharing! What a weird approach on their part, i wonder if they were having problems with multiple bids from fake names or something.

That's the whole story. They'll send a message saying "looks like this isn't working out for you".

Why applying when you already knew what they would be paying ?

Lol, I was applying asking for my regular rate.

if you're in france and maybe europe malt is a good site

It would be helpful for downvoters to explain why this comment was down voted.

Is it not available in Europe? Is it not called malt? Is it a shitty product? Did the parent not capitalise France?

Malt requires freelancers to publicly state their daily rate in order to be listed for contracts where they don't serve as an intermediary. (At least that's how I read their terms.)

"Publicly" in the sense of: Can be found via google.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

I'd rather go to a shop that lists it's prices.

If it drives more customers to the site, the contractors gain also.

Use something like codekeeper and contract directly.

Why do you need a middleman in the first place?

As a dev I'm happy with Arc [0] & Codementor [1]. I assume clients have a good experience here as well.

---

[0]: https://arc.dev

[1]: https://www.codementor.io

Unacceptable, hope this gets visibility and fixed

Exactly the case where Bitcoin could be useful. I remember paying someone 0.6 BTC for a day's work processing a bunch of photos :) As to those sites, Fiverr proved the most convenient, hired a lot of contractors there. They accepted Bitcoin at that time, not sure about now.

What exactly would be solved by Bitcoin here ?

Bitcoin is not an escrow, and crypto escrow is a joke for contracting - by the time you deliver the crypto value could be off insanely.

Currency stability is a relative and psychological issue; for someone in Russia, people holding USD are crazy adventurers, as value of US dollar fluctuated from 120 rubles to 50 and now back to 76, all within a year. For a Bitcoiner, a USD hodler irresponsibly lost 99% of his savings within a few years.

The important part is its value relative to the value of your expenses.

Actually with advanced cryptocurrencies this is false. One can build an escrow system that uses a stablecoin and does not require a third party. (It's also possible to build in different types of public arbitration if you want.)

I don't see how Bitcoin can fix terrible customer support issues. The problem here is that either:

a) OP is stuck in a cycle where he's inquiries are managed by bots and no human is actually verifying the claims.

b) OP breached the terms in a serious way and UpWork is not being transparent as of why they are deleting his account.

UpWork offers a lot of services for both freelancers and clients (escrow, payment protection, guarantees, etc), that's why they handle the money and keep them on platform until the job are completed. Freelancers know that they will get paid if they get the job done, while clients know that they money are safe if the freelance doesn't deliver. It's a trusted middleman. I don't see how bitcoin can solve any of these issues.

The escrow and trust part can be handled in 1) reputation system 2) breaking the work into small parts and not risking large amounts at once.

You would need a platform for that. Coincidentally t's exactly what Upwork does.

Gitcoin is a place to go if you want to pay contractors with cryptocurrencies.

Spend $100k that he doesn't have on lawyers only to potentially recover $10k good times. Corporations need to be fined millions of dollars every single time this happens even once.

Other way I think these things could be improved if there was legal equality. This means the defendant couldn't spend more on legal help than the claimant. If defendant found using inappropriate legal help, they the ruling would be automatically in favour of the claimant.

Example: A big corporation done something wrong and you want them to make things right. You only have $2000 budget and so big corporation will not be able to use more than $2000 for their defence. If they have any lawyers on retainer etc they won't be able to use them either.

If corporations would like to spend let's say $1m on defence, they would have to give claimant $1m to spend on their claim.

I think in the small claims courts of California, lawyers are banned. Iirc there was a story where someone took Google to small claim and a paralegal appeared to defend google.

I’ve read the same headline like 100 times from different people, at this time it is on you if you loose everything to them. Dont use garbage.

Upwork this is an automated violation on your end. What is the best way to escalate and get this resolved in a timely manner?

similar thing, but I didn't lose some money because automatic witdrawl if >100$

LOL, reminds me of PayPal

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