Ask HN: What's the best course of action to fight against upwork

[talal7860]

Hey HN community

I'm not sure if this is the best platform for asking questions like these, but I didn't know where else to go.

I'm relatively new in Canada, and in the past I used my Upwork account a lot, but not so much recently. Then I decided to revive it to make some extra bucks. Upwork asked me to verify my identity, and I submitted my driver's license, they sent me an email telling me that they are suspending my account permanently due to falsification of information. I'm pretty sure that's this is a false positive, but no matter what I say, all I get in response is "Our decision is final".

I don't want to lose my 10 years old Upwork account which has thousands of hours on it. I wanted to kind of force them so that a human can verify my documents. How can I do that? Perhaps I'll a lawyer, if anyone who had similar experience before, please recommend one.

[mooreds]

If I was taking the fight to a bigcorp, I'd probably do the following:

* see if I knew anyone on the inside (linkedin, slacks) who could shed more light

* see if there was a government agency with authority. I've had luck using this avenues to get bigcos to pay attention

* make a stink (publish a blog post, tag them on twitter) as best as you can. Don't be mean or childish, but bad press is no fun for a bigco.

* review the terms of service carefully yourself and see if there are any ways to escalate

* reach out to past happy customers on the platform and let them know of your issue. They might be able to send a message in support.

If you have money to spend, you could ask a lawyer to review terms and conditions, but my guess is they're pretty airtight.

[ipaddr]

I've been successful on upwork in the past. When they started asking for money to buy credits to bid on projects I moved on.

As painful as this is.. you need to move on. 10 years doesn't get lost it gets put on your resume