Complete waste of time and money A complete waste of time and money. Their pro membership gives you more connects, but it doesn't help you get work. When you're starting from scratch its literally impossible to get work without any reviews. You can be the most talented, experienced professional in your field but you'll lose out to a cheap off-shore solution. I've spent hundred of dollars on membership, sending proposals, cutting costs to the point of it not even being worth it, and still no interest.

site that extracts data and money Freelancers have to make a public profile with a photo of their face, first name and city, which is enough information to identify you if you live in a smaller town or just have an unique name - at the same time it doesn't influence scammers with a very common name or those who are unreachable anyway. Clients don't have to do the same and there are lots of scams. You need to pay upwork to apply for jobs, so freelancers are basically paying to get scammed. At the same time, actual clients aren't happy with the results, as the site focuses more on people's appearance and names (this whole site looks like Facebook), rather than verifying their portfolio and work experience. It is a perfect place to mine data though.

tl;dr Upwork simply dont. tl;dr Upwork simply dont. Upwork is a very bad place to work with clients. I tried to offer severl projects. As soon as one project was accepted by a freelancer the site suspended my profile. Support is not helping at all. Their responses are not related to the issue. Verification process is failing for unknown reasons, no feedback. Tickets are marked as solved without being. Communication with freelancer who started with the project is not possible, as they Upwork denies any communication. Long story short, i went to another site which is much better.

Upwork is a joke Upwork is a joke. We got scammed and opened a dispute. The scammer is not responding and Upwork is literally saying "he is not responding so we are closing your dispute in his favor"...

I dont want to share my privacy on Internet. Recently, the mandatory identity verification issue it has enforced has been a complete fiasco. Really, why aren't the authorities putting a stop to this? Employers(or upwork) are asking for personal information from us because they don't believe where freelancers live. I don't find it ethical for them to request intimate details such as our ID number, personal photo, another selfie on top of that, our date of birth, gender, nationality, and when our passport will expire. No one should have to trust anyone completely. There's no guarantee we'll find clients, yet we're giving information to strangers. It's unsettling.