after several negative experiences on this site, i can only conclude that it's because upwork allows it to the point that they almost encourage it. they don't care about copyright, they don't care about breaches of contract or false advertising/statements, in fact they try their very best in fact to hide any indication that a freelancer has done anything wrong or illegal. they care only about profit, which is undoubtedly why the platform has become a mess. think about this: they let freelancers remove botched jobs simply by refunding the client. what i found out recently is that they even give top rated providers the benefit of REMOVING feedback for no reason other than if they desire to. if clients knew how bad some of these clients were, they wouldn't hire or would venture to another website.
if a freelancer submits someone else's copyrighted work as their own, and receives a negative review because of it, all they have to do is refund the client in order to remove the blacklist that the client otherwise would have imposed on the freelancer. if the freelancer steals or cheats the client, same thing. it's absurd to me.
i just finished reporting a freelancer to upwork and they basically have shown no interest in any of the freelancer's behavior. i hired a person to create a logo for me and of course, the initial set looked like work that someone with no skills would have provided. accepting my loss and the blame for thinking i would have gotten something better for the price i paid, i merely asked him to do one simple thing, like make the side of a letter straight. he was unable to understand this, even after i provided a reference. so he asked me to draw it by hand, which I did 3 times. he responds by saying it looks like what I originally referenced. obviously?
then he goes and does the opposite, and at this point, i'm flabbergasted and upset that i'm doing for this guy what I paid him to do. he couldn't even provide a single suggestion towards revising the logo. so i told him i wanted to end the job, and he doesn't understand. so i stop responding to him, and a few weeks later, I find out that he submitted the job and escrow was released since I never responded to the submission.
so i ask him for a refund, and he doesn't respond. i ask him again, and he says no because he worked so hard blah blah blah even though I knew he didn't spend more than 5 minutes on the job. he won't even finish the work that he clearly did not finish because he himself kept asking me for instructions, despite promising unlimited revisions (and let me remind you he did not do even one). instead of just doing the work, which would have been MUCH easier. he chose to avoid it and talk about how difficult it was to make the logos, comparing them multi-million dollar logos used by giant corporations. he even claims the fonts were customized.
i am just laughing as i'm reading this, and tell him i could have just used free fonts. he issues me a challenge to reproduce what he did, and having already seen and played with many and some of those very fonts, I did so, and with little effort. instead of refunding me, what does he do? says that I stole his work and defrauded him. now, i'm getting irritated and try to explain to him that none of what he's saying even makes sense, though at this point i realized i'm dealing with an idiot. instead of doing the work and providing valid counterarguments to my case, he just says stranger and stranger things and continues to accuse me of fraud and cheating freelancers. and this while he has simply not even completed the job.
i file a dispute with upwork and they say they are just going to refund me instead of putting me through the dispute process. so, i thank them for that, but they don't seem to care that this guy didn't finish the job, lied about fonts, basically stole my money and didn't finish the job, and called me a liar and fraudster.
after my public feedback posted for him publicly, his public response to the feedback was that I was fraudulent and a liar (spelled wrong of course.) he even claimed he had 124/125 other clients give him outstanding ratings and feedback. i could easily see that by going through his history, which he had removed some of, and job success score, that that claim was unequivocally impossible. now, i would consider this not only slander but false advertising since the numerical figure he made about client satisfaction was a fact and simply untrue. upwork claimed that everything he said was considered opinion, though legally speaking, that is undoubtedly untrue. upwork themselves may or may not be liable for what a user posts, but they obviously have no interest in correcting factually false statements.
so to find out that this person can just remove my feedback of everything he did with ease is kind of scary to me and it speaks to the fact that upwork has no interest in transparency and objectivity of freelancer profiles. they can say anything they want regardless of how false or outrageous it is without repurcussions, so why wouldn't they? if he can steal my money, call me a liar and fraudulent in reponse to a negative review, or simply delete the feedback, that passes all the costs along to the unassuming client. i remember years ago i was considering hiring a developer (or maybe i did hire him, i don't remember, and may have just interviewed him but didn't leave me with a good impression). he had limited, but positive reviews. i remember checking on his profile sometimes after that, and was a little surprised to see a string of negative ratings. so why did i think he was going to be good/decent intially? well, upon checking his profile again after awhile, both those negative jobs disappeared. i thought i was going crazy until i discovered how easy it was for freelancers to remove that kind of valuable, vital information that clients would want.
too bad it doesn't work the same way for clients. i could just lie to freelancers and if i got bad feedback, just call them a liar and say i gave all my freelancers million dollar bonuses. that is, temporarily, before i deleted the review, of course.
