Freelancer was grossly incompetent and admitted to lying about their university qualifications. Will Upwork help me reclaim my money?
TL;DR- Person submitting job apps for me was adding massive lies to my resume for months, lied about being a college graduate, refused a refund, tanked my client rating and now I can't get proposals for a replacement. How screwed am I?
I hired someone who billed themself as an experienced reverse recruiter in December to apply for jobs on my behalf (reverse recruiting). Perfect job satisfaction score, top rated freelancer. I gave them the criteria of what to apply for, my resume, my cover letter and turned them loose back in December. Between updating a log of their activity in a google doc and checking the work diary everything looked great. Freelancer was putting up good numbers and I was getting interviews occasionally although not that often.
Earlier this week I decide to give the work diary a deep dive. I figured that after being employed for so long they would have started to slack off or otherwise pad their hours. Instead I discovered something much much more concerning. The screenshot had my resume open but it had the wrong work experience. Like right under my name were jobs I had never worked at. WTF.
My first thought is they were doing work for another client and hiding it in my resume. I start looking through the rest of the work diary and all kinds of little shit jumps out at me. All the sudden it looks like they have been routinely lying on my resume and never mentioned it to me.
I message the freelancer and start asking questions. She tells me "Oh yeah I adjusted your resume to match the job description, I didn't intend to fake anything". Over the next few hours, she avoids taking responsibility for as much as humanly possible and begins to tell outright lies until I confront her with screenshots that prove she's lying. Finally I get her on the phone and find she's not as good at lying to my face. The truth starts to come out.
She used the resume with multiple fake employment experiences for at least a week and a half. She has on AT LEAST 100 occasions put complete and total lies on my resume to match the job descriptions in the summary and skills sections but only added fake employers recently. This was never asked for, never mentioned to me, she did this completely on her own accord without my permission.
I had had a half dozen interviews that went horribly and I assumed the interviewers had me mixed up with someone else when they asked me about experiences and qualifications I did not have. No she had been submitting resumes with completely bogus qualifications and NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT IT EVER.
She was clearly a very very young person and when pressed admitted to still being a university student despite claiming to have graduated in 2014 on her profile. I have this recorded on an Upwork recorded zoom call.
I asked for a substantial voluntary refund in exchange for leaving no feedback on the job, now totalling more than $1000. Freelancer refused. We went back and forth for a day and I finally said fuck it. Reported her to upwork for lying about her qualifications. Honest review of the service she provided.
Went back to the first invoice where I could prove she was sending fraudulent resumes and tried to start disputing all of them. To my surprise you can only dispute one pay period at a time.
She leaves me a one star reveiw and completely tanks my rating. Now I can hardly get proposals to replace her.
Do I have any hope of reclaiming my money, my Upwork rating or seeing any justice in this situation?