New member question

[dfc43fef]

Hello everyone .

I have a question. I am freelancer, after got offer of doing retype pdf to MSoft word , they want me pay some amount registration fee and I did pay them through Paypal, they send me email with the project? Now I am scare it can be scam.

 they said it was been close because of me, they will pay me when i return the complete the project. 

Is it something if they close without doing on upwprd, they can not put up agan? And can I trust something like this> Because I paoid registration fee aldready now I am so worried> Any advises

Thank  you 

Oanh Hoang

[roberty1y]

You have been scammed. Real clients never ask for a fee. You shouldn't have had any communication with this person outside of Upwork, as there was no contract - that's the first rule you need to know, and if you abide by it you won't be scammed. 

[pgiambalvo]

Scam. Sorry this happened to you. You will not get your money back. Hopefully, Upwork will be able to stop more of these from being posted.

[colettelewis]

Oanh, 

It is definitely a scam. It is against Upwork's rules to have any communication with a client outside the site, unless you have an official Upwork contract. So if anyone says they want you to communicate in any way except on Upwork, then you can assume it is a scam. The other Upwork rule is that you never accept payment in any way except through Upwork. As you are very new here, it is very unlikely for anyone to  invite you to a job, so if you get an invitation, you can be almost 100% sure that it's a scam. 

Before you apply for any job on Upwork, you really must look at the many help pages on Upwork that help new freealncers. You could start just by clicking on one of the articles on the right of this page such as "New to Upwork 101" or the one below it.

[pgiambalvo]

Why didn't you know that it's not allowed to have any communication with a client off of Upwork before there is a contract in place?

[yofazza]

I got the impression somewhere that they changed things a little. A notification will appear on new conversation with clients, telling about outside chat and else.

Not sure about it because I don't have any new conversations yet. But if it does happen then it's not enough to solve the problem.

Might need to change the wordings. I'll skip notification about "outside chat isn't allowed" but something like "99% freelancers got scammed" will get my attention.

[pgiambalvo]

Yeah, I heard that too. So I guess it doesn't always happen or that people are ignoring it, which I would doubt.

[martina_plaschka]

It is not true that 99% of freelancers get scammed. My guess is it's the other way around - out of a few million freelancers, 1% gets scammed. Probably not even that high a number. You can't expect a large corporation like upwork to defame themselves by putting this into their messaging.

[yofazza]

> defame themselves.

Yes I understand they don't want to (not that they shouldn't) bring up this problem too seriously. They see it as a bad publicity.  Similar reason why the mods don't refer to Wes' post when giving suggestion, but use their own "more stiff" version instead.

They can find something in between. I'm pointing out that a notice about "don't talk outside" is too obvious for me because of course they don't want anyone to talk outside even without reading the rules or knowing about the scam. My eyes saw it but I "ignored" it. It's different when they say something like "there's a big problem going on right now" in the notice.

New freelancers who are eager to work might have a similar experience. The 99% I mentioned, although still boasting, are meant at them.

[456dcf54]

That was a scam...  I'm sorry...   you should never pay to work...