Hourly billing scam - Upwork ignored me

[0b2e2030]

Wow - I am beyond words.

I recommend you to never do hourly contracts in upwork- it puts you at a huge risk. 

I feel like upwork is not protecting me. 

This is after a developers Ukraine agency with tons of great reviews billied me for 300+ hours and never delivered the project. they pulled and pulled..."we have bugs to fix"... until they knew I can't get a refund.  Upwork also ignored me in this case because of their hourly protection. 

An hourly contract I had since I opened my Upwork account in 2017 was finished because the person did a terrible job,  they billed hours and did things I didn't ask them to do, so I stopped working with them - but I never was able to officially close the account. 7 years later (!!!) the client charged me small amounts of $50 for 3 weeks, one after another, in total $150.

Until I noticed it was too late because the hourly rate protection have a ridiculously short deadline of dispute of barely a week...

I was not aware of those small weekly hourly charges because I have other upwork contracts open, and I never got any notification but when I saw this person used the open contract to charge me quietly, out of nowhere and without saying a thing, so sneaky...

Of course I filed a dispute but I got the most terrible canned response that their hourly protection is valid for just a week. 

The scammer have said he refunded me $50 (out of $150!), just for the "protected" hourly billing... and was asking for his account back...

The upwork team told him to send a proof  for the refund (what? can't they see it?), and that they say that they will activate his account back.

Wow! I am just chocked from this terrible support! How is this possible?

Who can I speak with about this scammer?

My next step if I don't get any reply from the platform is to sumbit a letter to CA Attorney General. This is so unfair. I hope this will never happend to you.

[JoanneP]

Hi Cherie,

I'm sorry to hear about what happened with your contract. I can see that you are already corresponding with our mediation team to get this resolved. One of our mediation specialists will assist you further through your ticket.