Client legal threats made me refund

[5d322382]

Hello,
I am relatively new to Upwork, but I just "finished" my first job with a client. Throughout the contract, I primarily communicated with this client via Skype. I was working on a prototype demo website for this client and was paid each week in milestones for about 2 months. I let the client know that I would be needing to end the contract two weeks ahead of time for personal reasons. I had developed a functioning website which I was running locally but had not deployed anything yet. The client was under the impression that I would have a functioning website deployed for them at a certain date and I had originally agreed to this. However, I failed to deliver on that outcome before I left but was able to pass off my code to the next developer they hired. For this reason I offered to refund them the last two milestones for the last two weeks that I worked. The client then insisted that I refund the entire amount of money they had paid me in milestones over two months. I explained to the client that they had 14 days review period for each past milestone and that they had already approved of each one and the demo videos and deliverables that I had submitted. However, the client then proceeded to threaten to take legal action against me for "misrepresentation" since I agreed to certain deadlines and deliverables but was unable to deliver in the end. I was tired of being harassed by the client, so I just decided to refund all of the milestones from the two months I worked just to get them off my back. Once I did that, the threats from the client stopped and they even left me a five star review. However, I feel like I got hustled by the client, having put in about 70-80 hours of solid work over the past two months.
I guess I am looking for any opinions/suggestions on what I can do in the future while working on Upwork to prevent this situation from happening. What kind of protection does Upwork provide for freelancers for this type of situation/client?

[yitwail]

Joseph, I have no legal training so can't address the validity of the client's legal threat. But once you gave a full refund, that's academic, and so is the five star review because you can't have a public review on a job where you receive no payment. Going forward, it would be best to avoid ending projects prematurely for personal reasons, unless the client agrees to such an outcome, and deploying partially complete code would be preferable to not deploying anything, all things being equal. Lastly, this is a bit off topic, but your profile violates site ToS because it has a link to your website that contains a contact form.

[5d322382]

Hi John,
Thanks for your response. I am not sure I follow you about the review. Are you saying that my 5 star review will not even be publicly visible because I had to completely refund the client?

[yitwail]

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Joseph R wrote:
Hi John,
Thanks for your response. I am not sure I follow you about the review. Are you saying that my 5 star review will not even be publicly visible because I had to completely refund the client?

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That is correct. I'm not an Upwork employee so cannot reference the precise document that states this, but for a contract that pays less than $1, there's no public review as stated here, so one could extrapolate that a total refund will also result in no public review:

Client feedback on all projects with at least $1 paid will appear on your public profile.

source: https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/215917628-See-and-Share-Feedback-from-Clients 

[martina_plaschka]

Never accept a job that you can't deliver completely and on time. 

When you fully refunded that resulted in a no-payment job, which is bad for your rating. And please remove immediately the contact information on your profile, upwork will think that you circumvented and received payment outside of upwork. 

[feed_my_eyes]

Next time, you should try Upwork's mediation services and if that fails, go to arbitration, which costs $291 and would have been a better option than refunding all of the work that you did.