Recently I decided to increase my rating on UpWork and boost my visibility on the platform.

I decided to make my UpWork profile specifically targeted on Scraping/Crawling/Data extraction, since I’ve got a lot of experience with it. So I updated my profile like this:

I also lowered my rate to $20/hr, since I wanted to get as much gigs as possible to earn more reviews from each.

After that I went on Reddit and wrote a post offering my automation help in exchange for reviews:

Results: the post got 9 upvotes and 5 comments.

The post took me 5 minutes to write.

And even though moderators removed the post:

… I still got private messages from Reddit users who read the post and were interested:

Results: 4 potential clients to work with via UpWork.

Some clients wanted to pay, and some wanted to work in exchange for a review. Nice :)

So I was really happy with how a simple post got me the clients. But the next day I’ve got a “happy” email from UpWork notifying me that my account was suspended:

It was such a disappointment to lose my profile since I’ve earned $30k solely from the UpWork.

So it turns out UpWork is monitoring the Internet and looking for people who try to do work in exchange for reviews.

Takeaways?

Never offer your work in exchange for reviews publicly. That’s my mistake that I wanted to share with you. Learn from it and don’t risk your own account.

Want to hear more from me about freelancing and getting to financial freedom as software developer? You can follow me on Twitter as I will continue documenting my journey.

P.S. If you liked this, give me some hearts for good luck :)