Freelancer.com: Is it a Scam or Legit?

OMG, I have just surfed the net and found some serious reviews regarding freelancer.com, and I think this should be a BIG warning to for people who wish to join freelancer.

scam.com/showthread.php?t=135356
read2learn.net/freelancer-com-scam-2012/
lisaamartin.wordpress.com/tag/freelancer-scam/

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I have read thru the talks and posts, I think that freelancer should take any actions for this hot issue. i also think it's stupid thing to work with with this kinda site.

What about your ideas...?

ODesk is better for both buyers and sellers...but this post is not right...If not for the "third world" country service providers, 80% of the people who outsource their work would be spending 2-5 times more than what they are doing right now. Poor people can't resist the sight of money....?...this is purely in bad taste...

oliva999 said:

I had few years experience with Elance. My advice - be very careful with 3d world countries providers - they will promise you anything just to get a job, then a different story starts...My last experience with Indians was a Nightmare!!! I was fooled by their decent English and, to make the story short, they did not even understood what is required. The main reason IMO these poor ppl can't resist the sight of money and they are taking all the jobs possible even if they are not able to complete it. No offense to all Indians

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I think the thread should be moved to its proper section.
Right?

I got scammed twice there and I never had a problem before. I paid in advance and released the payments and the freelancers never responded. However I opened a Paypal Dispute against freelancer for my payment and still a battle, it's been a month and Paypal has yet to release the payments. Has anyone ever won a case against Freelancer?

I was immediately banned upon opening a dispute and I been email back and forth with them - telling me that I should close the Paypal case and give the freelancers a chance to refund me... YEAH RIGHT ! why not let them deal with the freelancers instead ?

I think people should stay away from freelancer

The site itself is not scam, but its buyers/sellers and the site admin majority of them are scammers. The administration doesn't take efforts to weed out scammers, I would recommend using BHW since you can shitlist someone if you get scammed, over all the community here has very high standards for both buyers and sellers and you can always report a scam and get him weeded out.

Site is 100% legit but the freelancers who work are 100% scammer, atleast most of them are

As I have noticed, oDesk is pretty much on the middle ground because both the small time workers can get job as well as the big time workers or companies. I find oDesk to be the best IF you are a freelancer. Elance has a tendency to be pretty biased when it comes to bidding to companies. As for freelancer, I haven't tried being scammed but the inferior pool of workers there is somewhat discouraging to be honest. However, all these 3 are not a fake/scam, they are legit.

Elance and oDesk are better than other freelancer sites. Freelancer.com is not a good place anymore.

Elance is best if you have real skills. oDesk is okay. It's a subjective thing, really. Regardless, I'd stick to those 2.

As I have noticed, oDesk is pretty much on the middle ground because both the small time workers can get job as well as the big time workers or companies. I find oDesk to be the best IF you are a freelancer. Elance has a tendency to be pretty biased when it comes to bidding to companies. As for freelancer, I haven't tried being scammed but the inferior pool of workers there is somewhat discouraging to be honest. However, all these 3 are not a fake/scam, they are legit.

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Just pay the $40 to be a "large company." It's worth it. If you want to make real money on Elance, you need the Connects anyway.

Freelancer is legit, though watch your back with scammers, they are everywhere and freelancer can't prevent it!

Site as full is not scam, but there resides many spammers who are spoiling the website...
be aware of them and you will be all safe

Do Odesk accept unverified paypal for payments?
anyone knows? i wanna sell my service their and leave fiverr for an hour

I've tried to find skilled designers at freelancer.com, and the proposals I got were 100% trash from indonesia & pakistan. Just really really really bad work I wouldnt even use if it were free. 99designs was bad too. I would worry less about scammers and more about the quality of work you find there.

I had some good experiences with Elance: put out a logo design, and got 40 proposals, 5 of which were by really skilled people. Of course, they all charged more, and except for one from Turkey, were all from europe or america. Never used oDesk.

So use Elance, they are great. Only thing good about Freelancer.com is the domain name.

Its true and I earn almost 10000$ from freelancer till now still working on freelancer.

Freelancer.com is the worse service I have ever experienced and will never use them again. No one in that company has a brain.

Basically I posted a project. The freelancer who took the project and was not equipped with the skill set to complete project and kept delaying.

I went to file a dispute and notice that my funds were already withdrawn because a dispute was already filed against me as I didn't respond to the freelancer. I had not been online for 7 days. Freelancer automatically gave my $300 to the developer. The didn't even investigate the dispute. All the dispute said was I was absent for a period of time (7 days). This was also during the Christmas holiday period.

Freelancer customer service basically said too bad, we will send a email on your behalf to remind the developer of there obligations. I'm still out $300 dollars and no project.

I am going to difer from the crowd and say I have had a good experience with freelancer.com. It is a legit website that won't steal your money.

The issue for many, though, is they pick bad freelancers and they get scammed.

It is important to vet your freelancers from the start. Research, ask them questions. Use the milestones. If the work is shoddy, you don't have to pay them, which seems dodgy for freelancers - but its great from a buying perspective.

To understand why I had a good experience on freelancer, you have to understand how I came into it. If I posted a project saying "I want a #1 position for X website for X keyword", you are going to get a lot of people from India posting who will be super cheap. But a lot of them will be scammers, whose work quality will be very low. This is very bad. You do not want this.

I went on to freelancer.com, armed in hand with a list of tasks I DIRECTLY wanted to have achieved. I had list of EXPLICIT, and when I say explicit, I mean incredibly explicit instructions. Step-by-step to the max. I provided the articles, I provided the proxies and I provided the email accounts. I then found a TEAM that had a leader that spoke excellent english, and I vetted them. Met on skype, chatted, sent through documents, we discussed them and I made changes to make it easier.

I have been working with this team over multiple projects, and I have been modifying my documents based off the results. I have achieved excellent rankings with them and I am very happy. It is a learning process. I asked for web 2.0's, and they would sometimes use wiki's that were terrible quality and would lead to dead links. And so I then modified my instructions explicitly stating to not use these, and we have been running away laughing ever since. We came across issues with social bookmarking, and so I modified that too. Things like this. I check the work, and I chat with the team leader regularly.

Because I know and understand what is going on, I can vet our team. By using freelancer.com I am able to pay them in milestones and they appreciate the reviews.

It is all about how you go into it. If you need pre-prepared packages my recommendation is the BST section, that is the best and I use it a lot in conjunction with my team.

It is a useless site now. If you want cheap and very low quality work you can prefer it.