Your Upwork Account Has Been Suspended - I have been working on Upwork for 7+ years with 40k+ earned

[alexzahir]

Today I woke up to receive a dreadful email from Upwork:

I have been working on Upwork as a freelancer for 7 years with 40k+ earned, a good track record and it has become my primary source of income since COVID-19. I have been working as a client since September and have had many good contracts worth $700+. I have never worked outside Upwork's system for neither payments nor contracts.

I have not broken any terms of services of Upwork. 

For my freelancer account, the only reason the system might believe I have broken terms of service might be that whenever I submit a proposal for Hubspot developer, I include a link to my certificate and the system thinks the numbers of the certificate could be a phone number. Then I select 'This isnt for contact purposes'.

For my client account, the only reason the system might believe I have broken terms of service might be that recently for a job I requested a freelancer to talk on skype because screen sharing is not supported with Upwork's video call. But I started the contract with the freelancer first before taking them to Skype so that does not break the terms of services.

Another instance for my client account is when a freelancer who had to optimize my Hubspot website for PageSpeed needed access to my portal to determine how long he would take to do it and I had to request his email address in order to give him access. He said he would do it in 2 weeks and that was too long so I hired someone else for the job.

I think because of this there might be confusion that I have broken Upwork's TOS even though I have not. I am willing to show screenshots of my Paypal to Upwork which is my primary method of payment and they can see all my freelance payments are through Upwork and none outside of it.

I would request Upwork to kindly reconsider resuming my account, so that I can continue working on Upwork like I have for the past 7 years and have worked almost 2000 hours and 170 jobs. I would really appreciate the Upwork community's help and support in this regard as we are all a part of the same family and have to stick out for each other in tough times.

Thanks

[JoanneP]

Hi Siavash,

I checked your account and it looks like you already have an open ticket regarding your account status. Please check your ticket number: 30408504. One of our agents will update your ticket to assist you further. 

Also, I'd like to remind you that taking communication outside of Upwork before a contract is placed is a violation of Upwork TOS. If it requires you to share your screen during the discussion of the project details, that is already supported on Upwork. We offer this feature as part of our new video/voice features in Messages. To learn more, click here.

[alexzahir]

Hi Joanne,

1. As mentioned in the post already, contact on skype was only initiated after the contract was started. The contract was successfully ended and payment made through Upwork. As mentioned here, this is not against the TOS:

2. In the second case, I had to ask the freelancer for their email so that they can get access to the site and give me a quote on improving site speed after analysing it. This is not breaking the terms of use as stated here:

I have already responded to the ticket this morning though doubtful of receiving an appropriate response. What irks me the most is this line "I regret to inform you that based on that review, it has been determined that your account will not be restored. The Terms of Service violation(s) in question lead to this final decision. Please be advised that we may not respond to further requests regarding this issue."

So someone could be using Upwork successfully for years and one day wake up to their account getting suspended indefinitely, with active contracts and payments pending, and get no justification or proper reason. And all this could possibly be due to some false alarms going off by the system? That just shows that Upwork has turned into a conglomerate that doesn't care at all about it's building blocks - its average regular worker - because they are so easily dispensable, right?

[alexzahir]

More than 24 hour have passed since I first received the message. From the time till now I have:

1. Responded to the original message in detail and asked for the reason as to why Upwork thinks I have broken any rules/TOS. I strongly believe this is an error by the system as I have not broken ANY rules.

2. Talked to a support agent through live chat. The first one abruptly ending the chat with a generic "Thank you for waiting. I have reviewed your account and see it has been permanently suspended due to violation of terms of service. Ater a careful review of your account, the suspension remains and we will no longer be able to revert the decision."

3. Talked to another support agent through live chat who was a lot less rude and responded with "Please wait for the reply of the team in charge Trust & Safety Team.
They will get back to you within 24 to 48 hours at most, but since I know how important this is for you, I'll put a note for our team so that they can get back to you the soonest time possible."

4. Posted about the whole situation on Upwork Community.

I have 8 active contracts in my freelance account, with $500 in milestone and another $500 arriving on the 16th. I have yet to know what will happen to the fate of my hard-earned money or the hard-earned reputation of my account that has been active since the oDesk days.

I will keep you guys posted, thank you for reading.

[JoanneP]

Hi Siavash,

I checked and currently, our team is reviewing your account. One of our agents will update you directly via a support ticket. We appreciate your patience. 

[kinector · Accepted solution]

Siavash, just letting you know you have all my sympathy. I really hope it works out.

I suppose once you're picked up by the violator detector algorithm, it can be hard to resume business as usual.

All the best!

[52605805]

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