I recently started working on Elance as well. 3rd job and boom. What happened is that I closed the deal for project which value was 1150$, completed it after few days, sent binaries to my client. Client was satisfied and released 650$ milestone, and I was waiting for more than 3 months for 500$ one. Needless to say, I never got 500$ milestone to my account.
After several attempts to contact my client, he got banned from Elance due to suspicious activities. I marked project as completed, and told to myself "what the hell, I got 650$/1150$, he got banned, life goes on".
Now, what happened 2 MONTHS after project was marked as completed is that client issued chargeback statement over his bank, and money got instantly deducted from my account by Elance, without any questions asked or rights to speak for myself. Not that only got scammed by client, but Elance provided ZERO protection to me and deducted 650$ from my balance, effectively locking up my account for any further withdrawals, because I had a bit less than 650$ on account at that moment.
So, yeah, those things can happen, which I never thought are possible. 2 months after project completion and getting money on my account, they just locked it up and returned back to client without any questions asked to me. Fully functional project, including sources, full conversation in Elance message board between me and client from which is perfectly clear that he is satisfied with project and is avoiding to pay, and his account terminatin by Elance are obviously not three enough good reasons for Elance to fill proper rebuttal to the bank.
I tried to contact their support, explaining the situation, and I got generic copy/paste message to every message that I’ve sent to them. I’ve been working for more than 2 years over various freelance sites, but Elance definitely has worst TOS and support to their freelancers.
So TLDR: BEWARE OF ELANCE SCAMMERS. THERE ARE PLENTY OTHER SITES AROUND THAT OFFER PROPER TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND PROTECTION TO THEIR FREELANCERS.