How to get a refund

[86724b43]

If someone fails to get your project done, how can you get a refund from oDesk? Thank you, Sefket

[asajid]

Hi Sefket, I'm sorry you are having trouble with your freelancer. You can directly ask them to refund the money. If they refuse, please contact Customer Support.

[db5765a2]

I need help . A freelancer cancelled a job without notice a day before she was due to submit.They  had missed the milestones that we mutually agreed on and I asked Upwork to intervene  after they  missed the milestone becausee I got a  'funny feeling' about  her.  They never responded. She has excellent credentials on her profile and seemed to be a perfect match for my project. A day before the due date-which she set for herself having missed the milestones, I get a note  from Upsource saying the contract has ended because freelancer has no time to meet the deadline. Begs the question whether they ever intended to.I had not paid her any money but had  partly funded the project in tranches based on meeting the milestones. Afte sending her my  angry feedback, I am trying to contact Upwork to get a refund for the non-completed.Actually no work was done. I cannot get a ticket , the customer care site has been off line for days [unless I am using the wrong site] work and the email address that I am using keeps referring me back to this non fucntional site to get a non existant ticket.Its been a week and I am wondering if Upwork believes that my deposit is refundable at their own discretion , in their own sweet time. I actually imagned that the money would instantly revert to my account when the contract was cancelled! HELP! I need guidance and savvy from those who have been using this service for longer than I have.

Thanks 

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Davina,

I am sorry the freelancer wasn't able to complete the job.

As for the refund, it has already been processed and should show on your credit card within 3 days. When the freelancer closes contract with funds in Escrow, those funds are automatically returned to the client. You can check by going to Reports> Transactions.

Could you please let me know if you see options to contact support in the Help Center?

[focusdigital]

Hi Valeria

Upwork took $600 deposit from me but i would like to cancel it because i realised the amount was $851 instead for some reason. Please tell me how can i get a refund / release the money back into my bank account?

Thanks 

Grace

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Grace,

I see that you already closed the contract and requested the refund from Escrow. The freelancer will need to approve the request and have the money refunded back to your payment method, or they could dispute.

Let us know if you have any additional questions.

[94eeeee7]

Hi Valeria

I create a offer to a freelancer but unfortunately he rejected it for no reason, even tho we already agreed. I'm wondering is there any way to track the refund? 

[PradeepH]

Hi Charrel,

I checked the refund transaction you are referring to and can confirm that the refund was successfully initiated to the original source on Jan 30th. Please allow 3-5 business days for the credit to reflect on your card. Feel free to message us if you need further assistance. 

- Pradeep

[c31ee361]

They do US dollars for some reason. Like the world revolves around US dollar and they can't convert, which is confusing.

[AveryO]

Hi Damon, 

I'm sorry to learn that this has been an inconvenience for you. I would like to note however that this is a thread from last year, but if you need assistance with anything, I'm here to help you. 

I wanted to confirm that all rates on Upwork are always in U.S. Dollars. However, if you are residing in either Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, Upwork will default charging your Visa, MasterCard, or American Express cards in your local currency. You may read more about it here. 

[bf45fb32]

Hi Dear Avery! Sorry, but I search someone from uppwork Team, who can and will help me by my Refund Problem!

I canceled two orders and I expect a refund of 200+600=800$
A manager of yours (upwork) said that my refund is on the way but it is not yet on my paypal account or on my upwork account (Balances are 0 (Zero by both accounts) Hoever
I would like to ask you to take a look, I would like to have this sum on my upwork balance to hire more freelancers....

Thanks in advance for your kind of help
Regards
Josef

[PradeepH]

Hi EuPass,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I shared your report with our team and one of our agents will reach out to you using a support ticket to assist you further. You can access your support tickets here

Thank you,

Pradeep

[6e663ba4]

hi the customer support link is down would it be okay to send me the number by email or in the replies

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi David,

I see you have already submitted a ticket to support. Somebody will get back to you via that ticket as soon as possible.

[mistykeith]

A contractor can't be FORCED to refund anything. If you've received work, or this is hourly based; the contractor has the choice of choosing to refund or not. My feelings on this... If I've discussed time issues with a client and am working diligently, I'm not going to refund any hours I've worked when the work diary is under the guarantee. My time is valuable. If a client grows impatient, they have the right to stop the project, but they can't force a refund, sorry. The only way a refund is possible is if the work never was done and an upfront payment was given, and even then I'm not sure about it. If the contractor can provide material for the payment then again this is up to the contractor to refund or not.

[efa7b27d]

Odesk is pretty slow about it, but I have worked with a contractor who ended up working for 9 hours, but they did the entirely wrong thing or broke stuff. You can ALWAYS get a refund. If you pay with credit card and you are unhappy, file a CC dispute. Nobody should get money if you are unsatisfied with the work. The response above is the epitome of awful customer service, and someone I would never hire.

[bronnyslav]

Yes, file a dispute with bank, get your oDesk account terminated and your card blocked as payment method permanently. IMO, you can always get a refund, sure. But getting refund is only justified when freelancer didn't do any work, did everything wrong or tried to scam you.

[6cd6179b]

Odesk, now Upwork offers zero protection for a client. Once payment is released you have zero chance of Upwork protection. A freelancer sent fraudulant work and when discovered within a few days Upwork refused to refund the money. The freelancer did not complete any work but the Upwokr policy is to let them keep the funds and suspend the account. The freelancer just opened another account and is continuing to scamk others. 

THERE IS ZERO CLIENT PROTECTION ON THE PART OF UPWORK. **edited for Community Guidelines**.

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Jim,

I am sorry the freelancer wasn't able to deliver the work as expected. In order to avoid such situations, we encourage clients to release funds from Escrow only after receiving and reviewing the work (if the contract is fixed-price) and to check the Work Diary before the review period is over (if it's an hourly contract). If the money has been released to the freelancer, it's impossible for us to retrieve it.

[prestonhunter]

I feel terrible that Jim worked with a bad contractor.

There may be little that can be done at this point.

But for OTHER clients:

You have a full TWO WEEKS to review work that is submitted to you before you need to make any decision at all about paying a contractor for work if the work is done as a fixed-rate contract.

It makes sense to use the time to review the work that was submitted and if it isn't what was promised, you can choose to pay nothing, or you can make a partial payment.

You can ask the contractor to make changes and re-submit.

If the work is done on an hourly basis, you can review the work whenever you want. You have the ability to pause the contract any time. You can watch work diaries in almost real time.

You can let a contractor work for an hour, and tell them to turn over the work, and you can review it to make sure it's what you expect. If it isn't, you can simply close their contract and work with somebody else.

Clients have a lot of options available to them to make sure they're getting what they want.

I know this may not help a client after he has released payment, but I don't think that it is reasonable to say Upwork offers zero protection for clients. I'm not exactly sure what else is expected.

[db5765a2]

I have had the same experience. somebody sent me what turned out to be a plagiarised  written piece with crazy, irrational sentence construction which seems to have been generated by those sites where you paste text in for it to reword for you. That stuff cannot be trusted. And there was a HUGE disconnect between the samples that they sent and the work delivered.I am now suspicious of whether that was their own work.Even my 12 year old daughter commented that the parts of the  proposal that they wrote read like a high school essay about Global Warming.

I asked Upwork to help me to get a refund after failing to get one from him.No assitance, no support and just a 'keep asking him ' and  ' we will invstigate'.Which I doubt they will.UGHHHHH

[906adc7a]

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

[cupidmedia]

S M: you can review the work diary. If it's clear that it's exactly the same screenshot for 40 hours then you can dispute it. If you're not happy with the outcome of the mediated dispute you can go to arbitration.

Upwork also offers you plenty of ways to screen freelancers before you hire them, based on their work history and job success. You have an interview process and tools to communicate with your freelancers. Lots of ways to prevent this type of thing from happening in the first place. 

I've been a client on Upwork for nearly 4 years and spent tens of thousands of dollars. I'm not a Fortune 500 company. I've never had to dispute anything and it's extremely rare for me to have a less than stellar experience with any freelancer.

You can see more about Upwork's hourly protection for clients at this link.

(Note: as stated above, I'm a client. I'm not an Upwork "shill". There are in fact no "shills" here in the forum. There are Upwork employees who have the Upwork logo next to their name, and there are freelancers and clients like you.)

[versailles]

S M, I don't understand why you haven't disputed the time log within the timeframe. When you saw that the freelancer wasn't working, you should have initiated a dispute. Instead you implicitly approved the working week.

It is not true at all that there is no protections in place, you just didn't use them.

You need to close this contract and leave appropriate feedback to the freelancer.

[VladimirG]

Hi SM,

I've checked and see you had a disagreement with the freelancer you mentioned in your comment back in May, regarding making changes to the product they've delivered on your Hourly contract.

Please note that deliberately posting incorrect information, disruptive and negative statement about Upwork, its users and Community members is a violation of our Community Guidelines and this behaviour will not be allowed in the Community.

[versailles]

I don't see the point of coming here and throwing false claims. Maybe it makes people feel better. Gosh.

[e1f658ac]

super agreed your feeling, i met just.....sad on this platform....

[prestonhunter]

When a freelancer does a bad job or can not do what was agreed to, she should issue a refund.

But if she does not, then the client does not owe her the respect that is symbolized by the time and effort it takes to pursue the matter.

The ultimate show of deserved disrespect that a client can show to a bad contractor is to pay her and forget about her.

Expending any extra time and effort trying to rescind her pay means that the bad freelancer matters to me. And she doesn't. So I won't even bother to try to make sure she gets what she deserves (nothing).

Also: Keep in mind that if I pay her nothing, there is no way to leave feedback.

[360dab98]

I have opened a ticket with upworks support becuase the same thing has haapened to me.

I paid for work to be done.

It looked like the work was done, till i had to update stock level for my website. Then the work supplied deleted and i hired another freelancer to help find and fix the problem.

This new freelancer tells me that i got scammed to the last freelancer because the work was never done and it was coding done to the website to look as if its being done.

What a **bleep** person!

[f547ac8b]

What about in the situation where the freelancer has no idea what they are doing and clocking hours while they are trying to learn on the job. They screw up your whole project and then ask you to pay for their time... Dont think so

[petra_r]

---

@Vadim R wrote:

What about in the situation where the freelancer has no idea what they are doing and clocking hours while they are trying to learn on the job. They screw up your whole project and then ask you to pay for their time... Dont think so

---

Pretty much like in any Brick and Mortar situation. If you employ someone and they are useless, you can fire them, but you still pay for the work they have done.

That is why you should check their work very early, before too many hours have been logged, and hire wisely.

Alternatively, used fixed rate. 

[VladimirG]

Hi Vadim,

If a client can't agree with the freelancer and address the hours not related to their job, they are advised to initiate a dispute as soon as possible and have the Work Diary reviewed by our team, in line with Upwork Hourly Protection.

[c9930d43]

Greetings, 

I have close to 100.00 on my account here I would like to get refunded back to my bank account. Can you help me please? 

[lenaellis]

Hi Gabriel,

Please open a ticket with customer support and they can walk you through the refund process.

-Lena

[focusdigital]

upwork took $600 deposit from me which was my initial budget and i want to cancel it. How do i get my refund back? 

[prestonhunter]

Grace:

If you were charged $600 to set up an deposit for a fixed-price contract, and now you want the money back, you should understand that the money is in an escrow fund that you set up.

This money is intended to pay a specific freelancer for work that you asked the freelancer to do.

You can message the freelance and exlpain that you want to cancel the project. The two of you can come to an agreement.

If you close the contract, you will be able to release the payment to the freelance, or request that the money be refunded to you. If you ask that the money be refunded to you, the freelancer will be asked to agree to that.

The most important thing is to communicate with the freelancer and make sure you are both on the same page.

If the freelance has already done some of the work, then the appropriate thing for you to do is to offer to pay part of the $600 to her. That will be more profitable to you, because it will increase the chance that she will agree to refunding the rest of the money to you.

[ecc63a81]

i cancelled a job posting without hiring anyone..
when will i get the refund which was deducted when making the job post ? 

[prestonhunter]

re: "I cancelled a job posting without hiring anyone. When will i get the refund which was deducted when making the job post?"

I'm not sure I understand your question.

I am a client. I post a job.

It costs me nothing to post that job.

There are no "refunds" associated with posting a job.

[also consider this]

I am a client. I posted a fixed-price job. A freelancer applied. I liked her proposal. I clicked the "Hire" button. When I did so, $100 was charged to my account in order to fund escrow. The freelancer never accepted my hire offer. I clicked a button to rescind the offer. I will get $100 returned by my credit card in 5 days.

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Arpit,

As Preston explained, you don't pay money or make a deposit in order to post a job posting. If you made a fixed-price offer to a freelancer but they didn't accept it or you cancelled it, it may take a few days for the deposit to be refunded back to your payment credit card. The time it takes for the refund to be processed depends on the payment method you used.

[ecc63a81]

ok got it 
thanks guys