Some years ago, one of my client went out of business and I wanted to give upwork a serious go, as I already had _some_ projects there, the account was verified and such.
Start applying on jobs that matched my skill set, asking for my regular hourly rate (hence the audacity). Looking backward, my requested rate wasn't even that high, but that's a story for another time. :)
Dunno how they work now, but back then they had a certain amount of credits every month that you could use to apply to jobs. IIRC, you could apply to 10-15 jobs every month with those credits.
Which I did.
I applied to about ten jobs, on most didn't had any replies from the client (they either closed the job or picked someone else), but the gist is that I didn't get any job.
One day, I get an email where the gist was: you weren't able to get any clients with your credits, so we don't need you. Same as OP, tried to contact them, but the decision was final and that's that. Fortunately, I didn't loose anything but some internet points :)