Maurice d.

Well, I have to say I have not been having good luck with freelancers. I posted a project on upwork.com and shortly after that I received an upbeat message from upwork.com saying "XXXXX is a great fit for your job." I had a quick look at the resume of XXXX and his experience looked great, hired him on the spot. Well since he had such a great reference from upwork I gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him bill a couple weeks of work without checking into it in much detail. Well $1100 later and none of the work is done. Reviewing his work log he was spending time looking for other freelancer jobs, browsing the net, not one screen of coding the features I was asking for. I cancelled the project immediately and wrote to upwork to check into it. They shrugged and said its been too long, I should have complained 'within the work week' which is four days.

Lesson learned: Don't give upwork.com the benefit of the doubt with their suggestions, even if the candidate looks good there are scammers operating on their site.

I am very negative on Freelancer after two tries. In the first try my account was automatically upgraded to a paid account without my consent, I started getting a monthly bill for services I wasn’t even using. In the second try I could not manage to reset my password so I started a new account. This triggered a review where I had to verify my identity. I explained to the freelancer folks that I am living in China with all my utility bills under my wife’s Chinese name. I have no mail with my address on it, everything I do is under my company name: bank, credit cards and so on. As a result I have $240 sitting in a locked freelancer account which my freelancer cannot access. The worst part is the freelancer’s account is also locked up, all his carefully built up reputation is wasted.