Freelancer
Questions & Answers

Tristan L. Has given the correct answer, these who ask you for samples of your work are bidders
Just like you they do not want to give you work, no they want to take your work samples to show
Them to others as they are their own work samples.

At scamlancer or what you call it freelancer the project get posted 3 to 5 times, here is how

Mr. X post a project with budget $1500,
Scammer (A) re-post similar project with a budget of $5000 so he get quick bids, and he asks for samples,
Then scammer (A) bid in Mr. X project and show the samples that he took from the re-post for the same project.

Scammers (A) wins the project,

Since he has no idea how to do the work, then he closes the project that was with $5000 budget
And reopen a new one asking the exact same thing but this time with a budget of $1,000
Now if the work is completed by any idiot then Scammer (A) will end with $500.
Since he will be paid $1500 from the job owner and he will pay $1,000 to who ever will do the work.

But most of the time the very same story get repeated scammer B now win the project
Exactly the same way Scammer A wan it, and Scammer B re-post the project in a budget of $500

And so on and so on till last one end taking some advance and off course lots of time, and deliver nothing
In which scammer B will do the same with scammer A and scammer A will do the same with the job owner,
The end result the job owner will lose his time and money and get nothing.

There are 13 million members in ids in number of accounts, while in actual people they do not cross 1 million
The rest are repeated/duplicate ids/accounts by the very same people.

I know some one called poospaj on freelancer.com, she's running a website that is entirely a copy of another "real" agency, even the text is the same and in the legal notice, terms, etc she forget to remove the others company name. So, think what you want. But let me guess. Hum, maybe they put this (your) samples of work on their site? And? What can you do from the us to india? Exactly nooothing.

I had a few experience with India freelancers, a whole lot of them, are crap, even with a neet 5 stars profile. I'm not a racist or so, it's my real experience. Last trouble was last weekend, this lady had no idea about the skills she had in her profile, just a hoax.

Why freelancer, like paypal, do not ask for veryfication

That's where all of the workforce is based...