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Upwork just stole $10k from me
- andrew_b0 4y ago[flagged]
- fpanzer 4y agoLOL, reminds me of PayPal
- nmfisher 4y agoAs a client, what are my alternatives to Upwork?
- wsc981 4y agoAs a dev I'm happy with Arc [0] & Codementor [1]. I assume clients have a good experience here as well. --- [0]: https://arc.dev https://arc.dev [1]: https://www.codementor.io https://www.codementor.io
- zttg 4y ago[dead]
- prettyStandard 4y agoFiver?
- bartread 4y agoNitpick, 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/ https://99designs.co.uk/ - Savio (market researchers) - https://savio.pro/ https://savio.pro/ - F-LEX (legal) - https://flex.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.
- bwb 4y agoTo 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zamnos 4y agoFor the uninitiated, mind explaining why TopTal (and the rest) don't look at all the same?
- i0nutzb 4y agoYou 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).
- bwb 4y agoWow, they banned you for that? Curious to hear the full story!
- i0nutzb 4y agoThe 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 :)
- bsaul 4y agoif you're in france and maybe europe malt is a good site
- benj111 4y agoIt 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?
- Garlef 4y agoMalt 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.
- benj111 4y agoThat'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.
- fbrncci 4y agoUse something like codekeeper and contract directly.
- Laaas 4y agoWhy do you need a middleman in the first place?
- ddtaylor 4y agoWelcome to HN where we provide support after large corporations fail to do basic due diligence.
- jb1991 4y agoA 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816
- dang 4y agoIt 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&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 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.
- infofarmer 4y agoAny chance for a dedicated section?
- dang 4y agoDo 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&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- goodpoint 4y agoThis is very serious. As these platform become bigger and bigger they become difficult to avoid for customers and workers.
- MattGaiser 4y agoEither 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.
- goodpoint 4y agoYour whole post is absurdly apologetic. Stealing $10K from the customers is plain criminal. It does take "extreme diligence" not to do so.
- madsbuch 4y ago> 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.
- MattGaiser 4y agoA 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.
- dannyr 4y ago
- dajonker 4y agoAnd they didn't refund the client either according to the tweets author... Nice business model.
- xupybd 4y agoThere 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.
- luckylion 4y agoWhat'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?
- jiggunjer 4y agoI think a US lawyer would charge about $200-300 for a formal letter. Could be enough to solve the issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- goodpoint 4y agoFor $10K there is no solution and companies know that. That's why it is becoming a big risk.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> $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.
- pictur 4y ago[flagged]
- MattGaiser 4y agoThere is hardly a monopoly in freelancer sites. Rather, this situation is rare and unexpected enough that clients and freelancers don’t price it that heavily into their decision making.
- hackerlight 4y agoSpend $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.
- varispeed 4y agoOther 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.
- nraynaud 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mateusfreira 4y agoUnacceptable, hope this gets visibility and fixed
- DavidPiper 4y agoI 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.
- madaxe_again 4y agoIt’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.
- throwbadubadu 4y agoResult 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??
- londons_explore 4y agoThey 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.
- madaxe_again 4y agoGetting 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.
- moralestapia 4y ago>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? (!)
- geraldwhen 4y agoWhen 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.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoFortunately 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.
- unconed 4y agoI have already heard of one story close to me of a company that had to fire someone because they faked their interview coding assignment.
- nraynaud 4y agoI have had a CBP officer asking me very light questions around python.
- miohtama 4y agoFraud 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
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago> - 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?
- bwb 4y agoI am hitting up Upwork support as I hire a fair bit through them and see if I can do anything. Such BS.
- fakhr 4y agoUpwork this is an automated violation on your end. What is the best way to escalate and get this resolved in a timely manner?
- henpa 4y agoI 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!
- negamax 4y agoThat was my first thought. Why can't they admit that they messed up. Total arrogance
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thriftwy 4y agoI can't see how it does not make some lawmakers eyes glow. "1M of fines say you will"
- luciusdomitius 4y agoUpwork 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
- moltar 4y agoOh 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.
- ajb 4y agoOne 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.
- zugi 4y ago> 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 $0.5 million. The competitor "destroyed value." Yet that's not only not criminal, but it's exactly the kind of competitive behavior a free society needs.
- Xylakant 4y agoI would expect that to be illegal already in most jurisdictions. I believe in Germany you could argue it constitutes fraud. Either the client received the work and it’s fine, then the contractor is owed payment for the work. Or the client did not receive the work, then they are owed the payment that they made. Upwork permanently keeping the money from both sides is almost certainly not an option. They might be permitted to keep the funds temporarily while they seek a resolution, but that should have a clear threshold.
- anonzzzies 4y agoThe problem is fighting it; in Germany this would cost quite a bit, even if you win. It should be a protection that if you cannot talk to a human who has mandate, you get your money back.
- kokizzu2 4y agosimilar thing, but I didn't lose some money because automatic witdrawl if >100$
- wildmXranat 4y agoI'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.
- dannyr 4y agoThe crazy thing with these companies are they say you violated the user agreement but doesn't mention what specific policy you violated.
- taocoyote 4y agoGuilty with no way to prove innocence.
- wsc981 4y agoKinda 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.
- not_your_vase 4y agoCan'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.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago> 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!
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoExactly 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.
- moonchrome 4y agoWhat 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.
- ilaksh 4y agoActually 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.)
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoCurrency 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.
- Laaas 4y agoThe important part is its value relative to the value of your expenses.
- password1 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- redbell 4y agoIn 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.
- Aissen 4y agoSomeone manually flagged the post.
- stefanwlb 4y ago[dead]
- kamikazechaser 4y agoThey 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.
- Euphorbium 4y agoI’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.