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2c827f6d
Community Member

Freelancer claimed his System was hacked and now my entire completed shopify store is deleted

Hi I am very upset and miffed at upwork. 

 

1. I contracted a freelancer on the platform

2. Paid and funded work. 

3. Freelancer completed Milestone 1 and 2. 

4. demanded a bonus as a thank you for his work plus a 5 ***** review 

5. i didnt give hmim a bonus and gave him a 4 **** review, no bad words from me

6. Freelancer was very upset. 15 mins after i gave him the review, he deleted my completed shopify store we both worked on. Brough his attention to it. he blocked me from communicating with instead

7. Tracked him down via whats app, claimed a hacker deleted my store (a hacker that was trying to destroy his business and his other client had the same issue wit this hacker)

8. Provided all the details to upwork mediation

9. Freelancer is not even disputing i have received what I paid for. 

10. He is only claiming he didnt delete my store (I asked for proof of hacker issue and other customer, he has not provided any proof). 

11. I have paid a total of $565 to this freelancer and still dont have a product to show for it. 

12. Now Upwork is asking me to pay 291 for Arbitration to sort this out... why am i shelling more money out when the Freelancer is not disputing my store was not deleted ( either by him or by his hacker) I was ask by upwork if i will let him build me a new store and i said unless he proves that he didnt delete my store ( by showing proof a hacker did) I cannot trust this freelancer with my new credentials..

13. I am upset at this way I am being treated and I demand better. let Upwork ask him to prove that it is hacker that deleted my store. 

14. Shopify provided my with IP address of last log in when my store was deleted. wich is the same location at Freelancer. I have asked Upwork to confirm if this is not the same IP address they have on file for him ( I still have not gotten a respinse from shopify). 

15. This very painful for me right now.

41 REPLIES 41

Abbi: nobody here wants to see any client have a disappointing experience, as you have had here.

 

I appreciate so much how you have come back consistently to share updates about your experience. That can be instructive for all of us.

 

I really hope you will take this as an opportunity to learn more about automated backups. That is really the heart of your problem in this situation, and that is something that has nothing to do with Upwork or any hiring platform.

 

Your goal should be to have automated backups in place that allow you to retrieve your data and files, so that if disaster strikes, you can recover without having to redo the work and without losing any data. Ideally, you want to have files sequestered into a place that you control, and which a potentially malicious freelancer, employee, etc. can't get to. As a practical matter, you might end up automated backup files that a developer or technical person can indeed get to, but which you periodically sequester to a private location manually.

Not for nothing, and I don't believe your freelancer was hacked, but I was hacked recently and had to notify clients, especially those that had shared passwords with me, and ask them all to change their passwords, etc., to be safe. It does happen. We didn't lose anything though. 

 

When you say you have no protection - you did have protection but you did not use Upwork correctly. You did not get all the credentials delivered back to you, which would be the final deliverable, before you released the final payment and left a review, which would have kept this freelancer from taking the actions he did. Also, when the freelancer tried to manipulate you for 5 star feedback, you should have reported that, and none of this would have happened. I'm not excusing his behavior, but you have to also examine how you failed to use Upwork's protection through the course of this, to the point you got to the end and could no longer avail yourself of  Upwork protection. 

 

Hopefully others will learn from your mistakes through this thread. 

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