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c78a3994
Community Member

Been scammed by a freelancer : upwork team doesn't care as they want to remain "neutral"

Hello the community.

We have been scammed by a freelancer **Edited for Community Guidelines**, we open a dispute, we have clearly described everything, but... but we have missed, due to overcharging working day the mail notification that the "dispute expert team" has replied to our dispute.

 

We understood that it is our fault to have missed the chance to get back our money, but if upwork would have done its work properly, its team should have had reviewed all the previous conversation in the dispute box, to see that we have been clearly, and without any doubt, scammed.

Today, they don't want to reopen the dispute because they want to stay neutral. How it comes that a platform doesn't do its best to prevent fraud and scam like that ?  What are our solutions ?

For your information, here are the facts :

We have hired **Edited for Community Guidelines** because she claimed to be very professional and talented. We gave to her 3 articles to be written, with very clear bullets points and even a lot of texts already written by our team. In all the case she has decided to don't pay attention to the guidelines, and to write 3 articles that are absolutely not matched to what we asked.

 

> The first one was an article about survey we have conducted in order to make our market positionning. She wrote an article about a financial ecosystem and she invented a lot of things in this article without asking us.

> Second article was a technical one, and was supposed to explain whay we have chosen JavaScript and C++ langages. She has decided to write an article about a company named **Edited for Community Guidelines** and to explain how this company is working...

 

> The last article was supposed to speak about investment in real estate, startups, and how blockchain is changing this. She wrote an article about payment transaction... In addition to that, the quality of the french and of the English is not good. We have explained her : please, look at the bullet points and the guidelines and you will see that you have written 100% wrong things. Then she committed with an new article, still 100% far from what we asked. For me it's not professional, and everybody is losing time. We don't want to pay for things we didn't ask, especially for this so high price.

20 REPLIES 20
aaron_luigi
Community Member

Hi Raffard,

 

We are sorry to hear about your experience in this engagement and the dispute process but thank you for sharing this.

 

The Dispute Team follow a certain guideline in handling disputes raised by either freelancer or client. We acknowledge how frustrating this is for you. However, Upwork may not be able to guarantee quality of work submitted  by freelancers nor that freelancers are vetted. But, we offer payment protection within a certain criteria to both clients and freelancers as seen in this article.

 

- Aaron
Untitled

Hello Aaron,

 

So basically it is very easy to cheat and rob people on your platform.

Upwork should respect more its customer, especially in case like that.

 

How to get back our stolen funds ? Could upwork reimburse you as upwork has decided to give money to a scammer instead of reviewing our case ?

Hello Raffard,

 

Our team representative already reached out to you regarding the dispute.  Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it. I know this is a frustrating news for you but please keep in mind that Upwork team is constantly working hard to serve our freelancers and clients the best service we could give. Thank you.


Untitled

Hello Ryan,

 

I know that it's mostly the fault of your managers, and not the worker of upwork. But fir me it's not what I could call working hard. You have a customer who has been scammed, we have provided you all the proof, and upwork decided to don't pay attention to it because we replied late. It's unacceptable.

Our question is : where to send a letter from our lawyer.

Hello Raffard,

 

I understand your frustrations. I have just made a follow up to your concern. One of our representatives will reach out to you as soon as possible. Thank you.


Untitled
gerrys
Community Member

It's the cost of doing business ... minus the 20% of course that always finds a "home".

cupidmedia
Community Member

Did you break this project into milestones? Did you pay for each article on a separate milestone? Did you trial the freelancer first?

Hi Jennifer,

No, unfortunately, the scammer asked the whole amount in a escrow.

We have provided all the information to upwork, so upwork has all the details, but just because we responded late to their message, then they did pay the scammers.

And now they are just repeating the same thing instead of trying to help us. I don't understand why upwork doesn't take its responsibilities and support the client, who makes them win money.

Does anyone know here who is behind upwork legally ? How to download the contract between us and the freelancer ? We would like to attack the freelancer and upwork. We do have the time and the money to do so, we will get back our funds.

I'm pretty sure if you show your lawyer the legal agreement you entered into when you used Upwork (which you can see at this link), your lawyer will tell you that because you didn't meet the requirements of the legal contract you had entered into you don't have much of a leg to stand on.

Jenifer, the facts are the facts :

We have provided all the information to upwork, there are something like 3 to 5 messages that describes the case.

The freelancer has cheated, we proved it, and you paid her just because we didn't reply in 7 days. I don't think it is normal in this case, since it is obvious that it is a fraud. We don't undertsand why upwork has facilitated the fraud ?


@RAFFARD M wrote:

Jenifer, the facts are the facts :

We have provided all the information to upwork, there are something like 3 to 5 messages that describes the case.

The freelancer has cheated, we proved it, and you paid her just because we didn't reply in 7 days. I don't think it is normal in this case, since it is obvious that it is a fraud. We don't undertsand why upwork has facilitated the fraud ?


 "You paid her" - no I didn't. I'm a client, just like you.

 

"The facts are the facts" - yes, and the fact is, you didn't meet your obligations under the legal contract you entered in to and therefore forfeited your payment protection.

jmeyn
Community Member


 

 



@RAFFARD M wrote:

Hi Jennifer,

No, unfortunately, the scammer asked the whole amount in a escrow.

We have provided all the information to upwork, so upwork has all the details, but just because we responded late to their message, then they did pay the scammers.

And now they are just repeating the same thing instead of trying to help us. I don't understand why upwork doesn't take its responsibilities and support the client, who makes them win money.

Does anyone know here who is behind upwork legally ? How to download the contract between us and the freelancer ? We would like to attack the freelancer and upwork. We do have the time and the money to do so, we will get back our funds.


So it was a fixed price job. With a fixed price job you have a whole fortnight to check the quality of the work provided before you release the payment. To be absolutely blunt: What did you do in that fortnight?

Yes, you were scammed but you brought it onto yourself by not following the existing procedures to avoid this.

c78a3994
Community Member

Well we didn't.

A dispute has been opened, we have sent all the information to upwork. But then, because we haven't replied in 7 days, upwork decided to pay the cheater.

We checked the work, we refused to pay for this, but she got paid.

Hi Raffard,

I`m sorry about the inconvenience this had caused you. 
Please refer to the information shared with you on your open ticket, and if you have more questions about this post them there and one of our team members will assist you further.

~ Goran
Upwork
petra_r
Community Member


@RAFFARD M wrote:

...because we haven't replied in 7 days, upwork decided to pay the cheater.


 Well, why didn't you reply within 7 days?

 

 

Raffard, had you followed Upwork suggested protocol you would not be in this situation.  Frankly, you have only yourself to blame.

 

The freelancer could well have been at fault - but because you did not follow through as the buyer ... you are have no recourse.  Understandably.

 

A true case of non-professional eats non-professional. If only people would read the small print.

 

If wishes were horses . . .

Or unicorns ... which seems more likely.

Unfortunately, nobody has a created a system, anywhere, in which it isn't possible to be cheated.

 

This possibility is not unique to Upwork. Some amount of caution is necessary by freelancers as well as clients.

 

The original poster has thoughts about things such as "lawyers" and "legal contracts." That is something we see from time to time among new users of the system. But for the type of work that is done on Upwork, these are not practicable ideas.


The domain for dealing with Upwork issues is Upwork. A successful business-minded user of this platform will think of Upwork as a domain unto itself and will understand and utilize its rules and procedures. Trying to push Upwork into some other familar domain (such as local municiple jurisprudence) may seem seem like an emotionally tempting thing to do, but the math just doesn't work out.

r2streu
Community Member

You opened the dispute. You knew you had seven days to respond (or, if you'd read the information regarding such disputes you would have known). 

 

You went a full week after hearing from Upwork without responding, in spite of knowing (or at least having access to the knowledge) that it was incumbent on you to do so within that time frame. 

 

Upwork didn't cheat you. You cheated yourself.  It's not Upwork's management's fault. It's yours. Own it. Learn from it. Move on.

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