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Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

The best part about Upwork is that they have invited me to be a premium freelancer and closed my account all in the same day. Hilariously I was told I'm not "good enough for the platform". I have had 5 positive job reviews, all pretty much 5 stars. That day I applied for 10-15 jobs as I wanted to bridge the downtime gap between two major gigs. I had 1500$ usd on that account, that I have not withdrawn yet. I was not working for peanut rate, but rather north of 50$/h.

Support was unhelpful and I couldn't get a chance to talk to human. Stole my money literally. They deactivated my account, and only after 10th email to their support have they've actually deleted the account.

Boycott Upwork.

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Is there more to this? How can they just close an account with $1500 that you earned and call it a day? If what you're saying is true there's no question that it has happened to thousands of other people too.

The only other thing I could imagine was the problem was that I was interviewed via skype and that the client had asked for my skype account (at the time there was no voice/video through upwork). However, payment was still done through Upwork which is what they care about. Not a single dispute, nothing.

I went back and forth about the money, threatening to take them to court, write blog posts etc. But, they were still sending me generic replies. At the time, I really could not have been bothered enough to hire a lawyer and go through with this. The project from which they stole my money from involved a RaspberryPi and some other sensors and modules which was at its infancy, so I have learned quite a bit, so I've let go, but a lesson learned was that I should never work through a mediator (if that's the right word), but rather directly and have a lawyer review my contract. Clients have also loved the fact they're not paying 20% extra.

It definitely has happened just read the comments, one guy with 1440$, others with smaller amounts - https://collegetimes.co/upwork-sucks/ plus other things people are annoyed by with Upwork.

For $1500, can you take them to small claims court?

I probably could have - but at the end of the day, it was money well invested.

I moved my business elsewhere (not toptal or any other platform, but a devshop) and told the same thing to 4-5 other devs that are my close friends who were charging about the same rate. At the end of the day, they might have gotten $1500, but they lost 5x that in matter of seconds.

I still feel a bit bitter about it though, but I need to let go.

Yes, but there is no way you can collect if the defendant is in another state.

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