Complaint Review: Upwork.com - Nationwide

Upwork.com  - the BIG scammer

I needed a freelancer to translate some documents for me, and tried to find one on Upwork.com

After uploading the money for the job to Upwork's escrow, my account got "disabled", while I started to receive numerous and insistent requests from Upwork to send copies of my personal IDs.

I knew from before, that almost all employees at Upwork are hired from India, Pakistan and other South Asian countries (most of the programming work and customer support takes place in those countries; this corresponds well to the fact that at least 95% of all the freelancers in Upwork are also from South Asia).

Therefore, for me it was out of the question to send copies of my ID to a private company, where it could be accessed and misused by the frequantly rotating staff, consisting of hundreds Indian, Pakistani and other nationals. Nobody would want to have their IDs copied, forged, and then used in human trafficking, illegal immigration, financial frauds or scams, other types of crimes or even in terrorism.

After I refused to send copies of my IDs, and asked them to either release the money to my freelancer for the job done, or to refund the money back to the credit card, Upwork's so-called "Customer Support" did not do that. Each of my emails with a request either to pay the freelancer, or to return the money, they replied to by pasting in the same canned request to send copies of my ID, together with false statements that "I must" send my ID when requested.

I don't know much about laws in US, but the legislation of my country Sweden, as well as of EU (which Sweden is a part of), says that no private company can demand private persons to send copies of their private, sensitive IDs. Private companies can ask, but they have no legal right to demand. The only thing private companies can do, is to refuse to sell services or products.

However, for me, living in Sweden/EU, and being subject of Sweden's and EU jurisdictions, Upwork's third-world employees (all disguised by western names, but still writing in the typical "Indian/Pakistani English"), stated that "I must" send my ID to them. Such falsely statements are a subject for legal suit against this company.

As per today, my money (a few hundred dollars) have not been refunded, despite my numerous requests and demands. People behind Upwork clearly have a policy of keeping the money to themselves on the excuse of "routinely controll" and "freezing" users' accounts, hoping that the users will get tired and leave their money to upork. By now I am quite sure that I will never see the money again. However, I do intend to draw these scammers into the daylight. The next Monday a police report will be filed on the grounds of money scam, and a legal suit will follow.

Furthermore - one could be a little confused, seeing many positive ratings of Upwork on Trustpilot. However, there is a simple explanation of it. Since I work with IT, I have had experience with many other freelancing and other businesses, many of which, just like Upwork, too have outsourced their operations to India, Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Such companies, in order to combat with the high number negative reviews, engage their own employees to put in positive reviews. In this case, Upwork has done a remarkable job. But this only can fool those, who don't know how these scam-based "companies" operate. What is the real ratio of positive/negative reviews of Upwork, one can see on Yelp dot com (I do understand it's difficult for Upwork to hold track of, and try to fake the positive reviews on all the websites full of their victims' complaints).

I hope this information will help people, who yet haven't encountered this company with a notable name "Upwork Global Inc.", and that everyone will think twice before uploading his money to this scam company.

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