Upwork just stole $10k from me

One of the reasons that criminal acts are criminal is that they destroy value. For example, when metal prices go up, criminals steal wires from railway lines. This gains them a couple of hundred bucks of metal, and costs tens of thousands in disruption and reinstallation.

This kind of action by companies should be criminal, because they just destroyed economic activity worth at least $10000, because they didn't want to spend a little more on due diligence. Which could even have been put up as a bond by their client. My guess is that it would have cost <1 hour's work to validate this guy, and obviously he would rather bond that than lost the $10000. But no.

I would expect that to be illegal already in most jurisdictions. I believe in Germany you could argue it constitutes fraud. Either the client received the work and it’s fine, then the contractor is owed payment for the work. Or the client did not receive the work, then they are owed the payment that they made. Upwork permanently keeping the money from both sides is almost certainly not an option. They might be permitted to keep the funds temporarily while they seek a resolution, but that should have a clear threshold.

Any AI or automated process where money is involved , any invalid action (deemed so by a human arbitrar) should be punished extremely hard, for any company. Gdpr hard; simply costing a % of the revenue if it turns out wrong and if the process was not reviewed and discussed with an actual human. We cannot just let this go on.

The problem is fighting it; in Germany this would cost quite a bit, even if you win. It should be a protection that if you cannot talk to a human who has mandate, you get your money back.

Yeah, I would hope so. But I mean in the more general case. If google closes your account with no recourse, they don't make any money from doing so, but if you bought into their marketing and relied on them, then you lose a lot of value. Companies encourage tens of thousands of consumers and businesses to rely on them, should be required to be able to be held to account by those they have led to rely on them.

If you prevail in Germany, most of the costs are placed on the loosing party. It’s still a problem, but in a case as such, I would hand it off to a lawyer and see where it goes. The bigger issue here is likely that the upwork terms of service stipulate a court in the US, and that will be hard to pursue.

Google loses money if they need to figure out whether account closing should be done or not.

For Google to make profit, they can just close your account and not hire humans and train them with enough internal organisation knowledge to politely and humanly handle these issues.

Better profit is to have automated/AI based system that closes accounts based some user reporting - which can be easily gamed.

Agreed, but as someone who had lawsuits in DE, the loser pays a nominal fees (I do not know what they are now, but they have to pay hours * nominal fee, not your actual lawyer bill) for the court costs, not the actual costs. If you have a good, which often means expensive, lawyer, you won’t recoup the costs if you win unless a fine is imposed on the other party.

But yes, jurisdiction is an issue, however damage can be done; they don’t want to lose EU and these are violations of our laws so they should be hit hard.

Arbitrary bans and deletions are illegal under German law and are open to legal recourse in Germany. A ban must be based on a violation of ToS or law and if the case goes to court, google would need to substantiate that. And even if there’s a violation of the ToS, the court may rule the ToS invalid or require a warning before a complete ban. These cases usually don’t make it to court though, often a sternly written Fax from a lawyer will result in unbanning.

A real user, who is going to lose a lot of value, would be willing to put up the minimal amount of money necessary to have google investigate properly. But google would rather destroy value than be accountable.

The costs paid are based on the “Streitwert” which in this case would likely be the 10k. There’s tables to look up the lawyer fee and the court fee. A good lawyer may demand more, but you’re still likely to come out ahead if you win.

You’ll likely also be awarded interest and the court-appointed interest rates are nothing to sneeze at (they’re based on the banks base interest rate plus a few percent)

Edit: went and looked it up: Interest is applied from the point when the defendant received the court papers and is currently the base rate plus 5 or 9 percent points.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__291.html

Quickbooks has taken almost $2000 of money, that my client paid for work done, for more than a year now.

I registered for, and received the payment through, their merchant account, but later found out I did not qualify for it since I was not in the US. I understand if their fraud detection systems flagged something, but all they needed to do was to talk to the client and verify that it was a legitimate payment.

They have refused to release the money to me, or to send it back to the client. They also disabled all my Intuit accounts, some of which I had paid a subscription for.

Likely a similar situation - either you or your client would be entitled to the money, but enforcement is impossible because of the prohibitive costs.

We have a few clients in the US and I’m always factoring in this issue when making contracts with them. If they decide to not pay a small to medium sum, collecting it will be impossible most of the time if they don’t have a subsidiary in Germany.

> If you prevail in Germany, most of the costs are placed on the loosing party. It’s still a problem, but in a case as such, I would hand it off to a lawyer and see where it goes.

All this means is that the losing party must reimburse your costs. Your lawyer is going to ask for money while the case is ongoing. So you need to have some serious money in advance.

Serious money is relative: Standard fees in this case would be around 1850 EUR including relevant taxes, but only if it goes to court. Depending on the complexity of the case, your lawyer may ask for more, but that you’ll need to have with your lawyer. Also, legal insurance exists - if you’re doing serious business you should either have that or set aside some money for legal representation - or be prepared to just fold in those cases.

There’s a reason why that Rechtsschutz is up to €3m.

> One of the reasons that criminal acts are criminal is that they destroy value.

Yes, and this is a complete tangent from your main point, but I worry about over-using the justification of destroying "value" versus destroying other people's "property." Not all things that "destroy value" are or should be criminal.

My favorite example: I own the only gas station on a busy corner and sell gas for $5 a gallon. My gas station is worth $1 million because of its money-making ability. Someone else opens a new gas station on the opposite corner and sells gas for $4 a gallon. My revenue drops, and the "value" of my gas station falls to $0.5 million. The competitor "destroyed value." Yet that's not only not criminal, but it's exactly the kind of competitive behavior a free society needs.