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Leon V.

Contributor Level

Total Points
92

1 Review by Leon

  • Freelancer

4/19/15

Having used this website both to do freelance work and to get work done, here's what I have to say:

They don't charge anything for posting a gig there, and do not vet what gets posted so all kind of crap appears there daily. Roughly 90% of projects are just noise ranging from "develop a clone of amazon.com, budget $30" to solicitation of prostitution.

If you're willing to wade through this pile of rubbish to find what appear to be real projects you'll quickly find at least half of them are either 1. Run by a scammer or 2. A fake, in all likelihood posted by freelancer.con itself.

Projects run by a scammer are real, in the sense you'll have to do real work. Sadly you'll never see a cent from them. Beware! This website is scammer central, plenty will award you a project, just to revert charges after completion or just paying a small milestone and leaving the projects open indefinitely, cheating you out of most of your money. In either case freelancer.con won't do a thing to help recover your money. Just read how many cases are documented in this review website alone. This kind of thing happens every single day there, and no matter how careful you are sooner or later you'll get bitten. Some of the scammers are amateurs trying their first hustle, others are professional criminal networks that have been doing for years. And some seem to be in cahoots with freelancer.con themselves.

Fake projects are there just to make the website look more attractive and enticing new users to sign-up. When you apply to them you'll never hear back from the poster and the projects will eventually expire and close themselves. They are only there to make it look like freelancer.con has good gigs up for grabs. Not so! I'm willing to bet this company has an offshore team of people posting fake projects 24/7. If you spend enough time on their website you'll start noticing the patterns.

So are there any legit projects on freelancer.con? Yes, they exist. I've done a few and I've got paid for them. I've also posted gigs there, paid fairly and got rave reviews for doing so. You can find gigs there on a daily basis, unfortunately most are paid at rates than make even Asian sweatshops cringe in disgust. From time to time real projects, run by honest people and with realistic budgets get posted. Been there, done that. Sadly, they generally get spammed to death by the aforementioned Asian sweatshops driving the poster away, usually to never go back.

Just banning India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would probably cut 90% of the issues with this site. Ban also Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand and China and you cut 99% of the troublemakers. If you're looking for work just look for projects originating from first world countries, same thing if you're looking for freelancers although I would also consider Eastern European and South Americans, I've had nothing but positive experiences with the latter.

Beware, though. Some crafty ones have proxies and verified identities in countries such as the UK, the US or Canada to fly under the radar.

As many others before me, I've been overcharged by freelancer.con, scammed out of project fees, and have had my withdrawal requests cancelled. Fortunately when that happened I was still in contact with the company that posted the project, which is run by a pretty cool guy, and he said his account had been suspended and showed a negative balance. They literally emptied their PayPal account with their hidden fees. This was on a project I was being paid £600 (minus 10% freelancer.con cut) and they had over £750 in their account at the time and still owed them money. Furthermore they demanded a huge amount of documentation ranging from passport scans to public utility bills to prove their identity, things that are against the law in all EU countries, but apparently are tolerated in Australia. Needless to say, they didn't want to keep doing business with freelancer.con. On the other hand, we have continued doing business together, they pay directly to me and we both couldn't be any happier. Although I never got paid for the first gig, freelancer.con pocketed £750.

Online freelancing sites are a race to the bottom, and freelancer.con has won the race hands down.

Tip for consumers:
If instead of using freelancer.con you can get a ticket to hell, go meet the Devil instead. I think it would be far more enjoyable.

Service
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Jielyn L. – Freelancer Rep

Hi, Leon. My name is Lara and I'm from Freelancer.com. First off, we thank you for taking the time to write this comment. We are always open for feedback and suggestions as we always strive to improve the site and our services to give our users the best online experience.

Just to inform you, we have a team that monitors each and every project before it goes live. If there are fake and/or invalid projects that other users report, we immediately attend to them and do the necessary action/s.

If in the future, you find yourself using the site again - either as a freelancer or employer - do not hesitate to let us know if there are problems with your account or if you need assistance. Thank you and take care!

Leon Has Earned 12 Votes

Leon V.'s review of Freelancer earned a Great Find vote

Leon V.'s review of Freelancer earned 11 Very Helpful votes

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