Be careful - Permanent suspension after 5 years on the platform, being Top Rated Plus and 100% success rate
Hey everyone,
I'm a Full Stack Web Developer and I had many successful projects & relationships on the Upwork. After putting tons of effort into it and being careful, they decided to close my account without offering ANY explanation, and I know that it was done only based on SUSPICION, without having any proof as I never made any ToS breaking rules - it's completely illogical to do anything to risk your account as good money can be made easily when you reach Top Rated Plus and have built a presence, if I didn't do it in the beginning why would I risk it after 5 years? But of course, Upwork doesn't care and just decided to completely trash 5 years of effort without any basis.
Just FYI, it starts with a verification process and they're acting like it's just a standard routine, but it obliviously isn't
Couple of things that I'd advise NEW and EXISTING freelancers to do:
- Always close your contracts or just a small bunch of them open
- One of the reasons I am positive my account got suspended for, is having many open contracts, which clients didn't close. I think that the number of them was 7. Now, that automatically rises suspicion because how can a single person work on so many contracts? Has to be sharing accounts? But, they're completely mental as it can easily be seen that I am working only on one of the projects and that the other 6 no time's tracked
- Don't work via Remote Desk
I was connecting to the PC via the Laptop to work from bed, but that again can rise suspicions.
And the best thing about it all, is that you can't know about these unless you are already slapped with the banhammer.
- Build a presence somewhere else concurrently while you're building on Upwork
They are obviously not to be relied upon, as even achieving a Top Rated Plus and 100% success rate will not give you the dignity of having their reasoning for such a devastating decision explained to you.
THEY DO NOT BAN with a REASON, they ban based on SUSPICION. You are not innocent until proven guilty, you are just GUILTY period.
I do wish you all the best of luck. I created this post so that other people could be aware of how low levels of humanity freelancers are given on this platform (imagine putting effort for 5 years into something), provide you with some important things I discovered to avoid being banned and vent a little bit.
With that being said, I genuinely wish to Upwork all the worst as they're worse than a toxic ex gf, and I already started bringing clients on Contra - which apparently takes 0% fee.
If anyone has a positive/negative experience with them, please share and take care.