Complaint Review: upwork.com - Aleks Angelov

Upwork.com Fraud Alert: My company posted a job for a video editor on Upwork.com.  The video freelancer we hired, Aleks Angelov, took our money and then just disappeared without completing the project. He stopped responding entirely.  He told me it would take 3 days, then he strung me along for 3 weeks and just stopped responding once funds were sent to him by system default over time. I gave him plenty of time before writing this review to respond to me and correct this situation. Still no response.  

  I contacted Upwork and they were no help at all.  In fact, I don't think a spoke to a human, I believe it was a chat bot only, with automated responses. 

  Aleks Angelov deserves to be banned from Upwork.com for fraud.  I hope my experience stops this rip off artist from ever treating another customer this way.

Not only has my project been completely delayed with funds tied up but I have had the worst experience with customer support on Upwork.com. 

Upwork.com Review: 

My experience has been horrible.  I've hired 2 freelancers, both of which did not complete my projects.  They over promise and under deliver. What's worse is that the site defaults on a set time period to just pay the freelancer whether he completed the job or not.  So in both cases, they got the money, I didn't get my project and since they were paid, they just don't care anymore about repsonding.  The first freelancer did refund my money but the second one did not. 

Their site (upwork.com) crashed for days and did not allow me to even login to even try to rectify this situation while I was under a work deadline to get this project completed.

 Eventually the site was functioning so I contacted support immediately which was completely unresponsive.  The support takes days to respond and the response is usually robotic autoresponders, not helpful.  

There is no phone number or real human conversation that I can have about my problem. 

I would like my money back at a minumum.  I've lost so much time and my budget is locked up in this fraudulent freelancer in another country which apparently, I can't even speak to anyone about.

The help docs say that I need to get the refund from the freelancer who isn't responding.

While upwork support isn't responding either it's an endless loop that results in me just losing my money with no recourse.

I hope no one else has to experience this after reading this review.