I was too trusting. Can Upwork help me?

[jthetranslator]

Hi.

I feel like there's nothing Upwork can do at this point, but I'll leave this here just in case.

I'd completed the first milestone and was waiting for the escrow to be released when my client offered another job without creating another milestone.
I accepted the job and started working and asked them to create a second milestone, which they did, without funding it.
I thought the first escrow had to be released before they could fund the second milestone, so I just started working.
They also gave me a deadline, so I asked them to fund the milestone, so that I could turn the file in, but they wouldn’t respond. It was a Saturday, so I figured they weren’t at work, and because the deadline was the day after, I just went ahead and handed in my work via message. I know this was my fault, but in my own defense, they were my former client and I was afraid that missing the deadline might cause payment issues.
Anyways, they said they’d get back to me once the QC was completed, and they did message me once, saying that my work needed to be "modified".
Upon receiving a screen grab, I realized there had been a misunderstanding and that it was not my file they were referring to, and told them so.
They said they'd check again.
And that’s when they went AWOL.
It’s been a month.

They're normally highly responsive.
I have another chatroom open with the company, so I tried to contact them through that one, but still no answer.
I guess I had to learn it the hard way.
What’s funny though is that this is a legit company; it's a listed company. So I thought anything like this would never happen to me as long as I was working with them.

The company is an online translation platform called **Edited for Community Guidelines**. Freelancers, be aware.

[spectralua]

Are you send first milestone? Use option "Send". Than wait 14 days, money will be released if no client action.

Then try to agree nex payment or just leave a true feedback and close contract.

[759e32fa]

Hi JungIm,

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. As Mykola said, if there are funded milestones, you can submit work and when the client doesn't take action, the funds will be released after fourteen days. However, since no milestone was created, the client was not billed.

We would recommend for you to reach out to the client. If they become unresponsive, it would be best to end the contract at that point.