My Freelancer has been charging me hour based...

fleance · ‎11-21-2023

Hi,

My Freelancer has been charging me hour based work but she has not done any work for 6 months! The weekly bill email is in my SPAM folder and I only realised it yesterday she has been charging me for more than 6 months of close to 450 hours! I contacted her immediately and asked her for proof. She is unable to show me any proof but she went on to refund me for last week's payment. However, she has cheated me of more than $7,000! We have no contact or messaging on Upwork, why did Upwork continue to allow her to charge me? How can I get back the sum of money of my life savings??

yofazza · ‎11-21-2023

It's not new.

Maybe it's time to get a lawyer involved to deal with these (so many of) unsafe Upwork's policies. "Upwork knowingly allow forever-access to charge our cards, to people outside of the company?"

what if I overcharge unsuspecting clients? It's possible and it's there waiting. I can charge that unsuspecting client I mentioned. I could charge small money so its easier to create excuses (their small money is big money for me btw), or charge big money and hope at least 10 days has passed before they realized it. When banned, as we know, creating new accounts is not really a problem now, and to get $4000 which is equal to over a year of minimum-wage is worth it.

tlsanders · ‎11-24-2023

There's a lot wrong with Upwork, but there is nothing unsafe for clients about hourly billing. They can limit weekly hours. They can pause hourly contracts. They can end the contract when they're done. And they can monitor their open weekly contracts and dispute hours.

yofazza · ‎11-24-2023

It's like the drag-race analogy.

People are different. Some are more prone to becoming victims. Maybe they have troubles checking notifications, or simply uncomfortable with reading emails.

The system should protect them, especially in cases of obvious and repeated crimes. What are the possible drawbacks of automatically pausing the contract after one week of no activity?

tlsanders · ‎11-24-2023

The biggest one is that many clients and freelancers have arrangements where the freelancer does work at certain times or as certain events occur. In that case, the client would have to restart the contract every time there was work to be done, and the freelancer would log in when a triggering event happened only to find they were unable to log time. If the client wasn't immediately available, it could throw off the project. Even if the client is available, it's a significant inconvenience on a long-term contract...and why should the client who is doing business appropriately suffer to accommodate the one who has not bothered to learn the first thing about the process before jumping in?

It makes absolutely no sense to say that responsible, successful business people should be forced to crawl with weights on their ankles to accommodate those who refuse to walk.

yofazza · ‎11-24-2023

Tiffany S wrote:
The biggest one is that many clients and freelancers have arrangements where the freelancer does work at certain times or as certain events occur. In that case, the client would have to restart the contract every time there was work to be done, and the freelancer would log in when a triggering event happened only to find they were unable to log time. If the client wasn't immediately available, it could throw off the project. Even if the client is available, it's a significant inconvenience on a long-term contract...and why should the client who is doing business appropriately suffer to accommodate the one who has not bothered to learn the first thing about the process before jumping in?

It makes absolutely no sense to say that responsible, successful business people should be forced to crawl with weights on their ankles to accommodate those who refuse to walk.

I have never been a client, but does 'unpausing' a contract is the same (hassle) as restarting a new one?

If "one week of no activity" can be considered normal(*), then automatically pause it after two (or more) weeks. These illegitimate charges occur a few weeks after the job is "done".

(*) For me it's not normal to not work on a project for more than a week. It happens, if I need to wait for something from the client, or, it's the kind of maintenance tasks, where the client must have trust the freelancer already to work and invoice them at any time at their own discretion. Maybe a simple checkbox can be used to opt-in, to actually allow freelancers to charge anytime for ever.

It's about protecting and victim-blaming. Just like your drag-race post, someone in the community might complain if speedbumps are placed in the street. Then just find some balance/comprimise, or other solutions. But in any case, nobody will blame the kids for their lack of experience, negligence, when they got hit.

If that's the case, then Upwork probably isn't the right platform for them.

I prefer working with project managers rather than end-users as well, but the crime here happens, targeting the unsuspecting people.

As I mentioned in another post, I have active hourly contracts with unsuspecting people where I could charge small money and make excuses, or charge big money and run. Or, I don't actually need to run because it's 'allowed', because this platform isn't right for that kind of client, and they are the ones who are at fault?

tlsanders · ‎11-25-2023

It's a single click to unpause the contract.

The fact that it's unusual for you to go a week without billing on an open contract doesn't mean that's true for the other 18 million+ freelancers here.

I would agree with your opt-in to this protection, except it ignores the underlying issue. The client already had four ways to prevent additional time from being logged and didn't. Offering them a fifth isn't likely to improve the odds that they'll act. What's the magic number? Must we offer them 10 options for protecting themselves, or 43, or 179 before it seems reasonable to expect a person doing business to spend 3-5 minutes understanding what they're doing?

The point of my drag racing analogy is that even though it would be the driver's fault if they hit and killed the child, the goal is to keep the child from being killed--so we would educate the children about the risk so they could protect themselves. Here, there are no naive children. There are adults who have chosen to enter into a business relationship.

All the babble about "victim blaming" is destructive to both freelancers and clients who get scammed. The person with the best opportunity to make sure they don't get scammed is them, and cooing at them like babies and patting their hands and telling them not to worry cause it was all big bad Upwork's fault does nothing to prevent them from getting scammed again and again and again. It's cruel.

yofazza · ‎11-26-2023

I have to disagree with "the client already had four ways".

If something doesn't work, it needs to be fixed. It's of course up to Upwork to decide which one's more profitable; leaving it as it is, or find something that doesn't annoy other clients but will help new "unexperienced" and "negligent" clients, to provide them with better experience.

> The point of my drag racing analogy

In some "environment", some people are just kids. They need the system to protect them. You can't, or it's really hard, to educate (some) kids. Earlier you didn't tell that you'd educate the children, but you would tell your neighbors, because you subconsciously know that educating the children is not an easy task.

You can't tell some old person to keep up with tehcnology-notification-thing, or to tell someone who's always busy with offline tasks to focus on their spam-infested email account.

About victim-blaming, again, it's very easy to do some unneeded work and charge small money to my currently active hourly projects. IF the client realizes it, I could simply make some "smart" excuses where the client most likely will allow it. And the fun thing is I'm not the bad guy here but it's the client's fault.

tlsanders · ‎11-29-2023

But what if some people just don't bother or refuse to use it? That doesn't mean it isn't working.

Do you actually disagree that the client had the options of:

1. Closing the contract

2. Pausing the contract

3. Setting a low or 0 number of hours allowed per week

4. Monitoring the contract

?

Which one do you think was unavailable to the client?

This "victim-blaming" blather is childish and destructive. The best way for a freelancer or a client to avoid getting scammed is to learn how to run their business responsibly. When you pat their hands and pretend it was all out of their control, you just disempower them and set them up for further failures.

If you had a friend about to walk down a dark alley populated by thieves and unsavory types waving a bundle of cash in the air, would you encourage him to go right ahead and do so because if he got beaten up and robbed or killed it would be someone else's fault? Or would you recognize that preventing the mugging was more important than being able to point fingers and suggest he put his money in his pocket and take a safer route?

yofazza · ‎11-29-2023

Prevention is better of course, but when it's already happen, I'd rather not blame the victim especially when I see that they are not capable of protecting themselves, including if it's related to negligence, lazyness, or greedyness.

The scammers are still the ones to blame. In my example in the last paragraph above, I (and all scammers) should still be the one to blame, for being even more greedy than the "usual" greedyness of the victims.

This particular scam doesn't exploit greedyness, but from what I see, it exploits 'the system' more. To fix this system flaw is not complex, I can't find a reason for not doing it, unlike stopping the scams on freelancers' side where I kind-of understand why it's not done.

Clients should be more important than Freelancers. I don't yet see any other drawbacks from making sure the client opt-in to allow forever-anytime charging of their cards, besides the "other clients will be annoyed" one (which they shouldn't, as those 'experienced clients' can simply opt-in at the creation of contract).

I'll change my mind when I find a reason. "There are already 4 preventive measures", is not one of them because, they need to find the 5th, if 4 doesn't work. Although again, I know it's for them to decide. They have the data if finding another solution to stop this, will be more profitable than keep allowing it to happen, or not.

Right now I'm thinking, the Clients are also not that important. They're truly focusing on selling connects.

fe9b8d82 · ‎11-24-2023

You lost me at "uncomfortable reading emails."

If that's the case, then Upwork probably isn't the right platform for them.

lysis10 · ‎11-25-2023

Radia L wrote:

The system should protect them, especially in cases of obvious and repeated crimes. What are the possible drawbacks of automatically pausing the contract after one week of no activity?

lol god no. I realize freelancers can't fathom working off and on for someone because they are wagies at heart, but not every client wants to log into Upwork when they can just send an email to do a thing.

yofazza · ‎11-25-2023

They can have the simple checkbox I mentioned in above then. Make client do "an action" to really allow the freelancer to charge their card at any time, forever. It's a simple thing that will reduce the repeated scam.

It's about reducing crime, protecting clients, instead of telling them to not use Upwork if they're not competent, or to blame them for becoming another victim of repeated scams.

Skip morale and the obligation to protect the innocent and blame the criminal. As we know, it's not important on the freelancers' side. But, is it really not important to have more clients?

Think, find compromises. Speed bumps are annoying to some but might serve a greater purpose.