I am asking the community if they find this far and normal Upwork practice with hard workers and how many of us, freelancers, were in the same situation where Upwork arbitrary made a disadvantage.
At the end of June I got contacted by a client regarding a complex job that involve a bridge between Metatrader 4 language and Excel, to be able to trade Forex direct from Excel. I was working for the client until the end of Aug, writing more then 3000+ scripts code, Mql4 , Vba, Excel multiple langauges and visual design. The jobs were separated into 2 different jobs with several milestones because of the volume of work and to make sure milestones are reached one by one. The client this waqy could check that he received what he asked for and want.
After I finished the job and sent the project to the client for debugging, my account got suspended for an investigation by fraud prevention. Now very important is to mention that all the conversation with the client was made through Upwork, all the files were submitted through Upwork. All in all everything was made through Upwork and the only "Red" flag probably in Upwork mind was that the client was from the same country as me and speaking the same language. Of course if you know you speak in native language with client since you both need to understand better and explain better.
After I sent all the necessary documents to Upwork, lots of screenshots, logs, ALL SOURCE codes with all the scripts that I worked on and after one week of pain they released my suspend from my account and restore it to normal. Of course since I did NOTHING wrong, it was almost one month of working and another week of pain with Upwork support.
In the meantime I spoke with another client to send him a proposal but guess what I was not able to do that because my account was suspended so the client coundn't get a proposal from me for almost one week. Now if I get a negative feedback because I was late with the propsal it will be my fault right?!
And wait that's not all, now is coming the nice part, I just got an email:
„We want to let you know that you no longer qualify as a Top Rated freelancer on Upwork.”
I am saying what??? This should be a mistake! I enter the live chat and speAk with an agent that is telling me my account was suspended so yeah I am losing my top rated.
What for? I didn't violate any terms and conditions from Upwork, I didn't do anything wrong, All my conversations with the client were through Upwork. I didn't got any warrning when my account hold was released. Now I am losing my top rated status because of an arbritrary decision that created me a big disadvantage.
How many of the freelancers got this problem in the past? Where is my Upwork escrow protection? Why is my fault and my account get suspended? Why nobody read the chat log with the client, why nobody investigated the work I submitted to client through Upwork and if it was the case to get suspended? They took the decision to suspend the account and afterwards to investigate...
