How Do You Avoid Getting Ripped Off When You Hire a Free-Lancer?

I recently hired a guy Nick Aurora, who claims to have a company called Scrollnext.

We agreed on $200.00 for him to build me a landing page (paid PayPal). Once we agreed on the edits and the final product, he asked me to pay him an additional $200.00. At this point I knew I couldn't trust this guy and I asked for my money back. I was worried he would put viruses or something on my website and then offer to fix the site for more fees. He, of course, refuses to refund me and my website is without a landing page.

How could this situation have been avoided?

Gazoo,

First of all, open a dispute on Paypal. If you sent the money "as friends" via Paypal, the money is probably lost and all you can do is move on and learn from the mistake.

Then, figuring out whether the freelancer is trustful, skillful and has no bad intentions is a bit tricky. What you can do is ask him for a portfolio and then contact those websites owner and ask them about their experience with the freelancer. Another thing is to absolutely make sure he keeps what he is promising. But the most important: Make sure you are using a payment provider that lets you chargeback the money. Escrow or Paypal.

Use third party sites like upwork, fiverr, freelancer dot com, bhw haf, etc to avoid being ripped off or scammed.

Rachmaninoff said:

Use third party sites like upwork, fiverr, freelancer dot com, bhw haf, etc to avoid being ripped off or scammed.

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This is the best way if you can find freelancers there for what you need. Reviews are a great indicator of a freelancer's quality and trustworthiness.

Helga_13 said:

This is the best way if you can find freelancers there for what you need. Reviews are a great indicator of a freelancer's quality and trustworthiness.

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Absolutely Wrong!

This guy has a ton of testimonials on his site. I still got screwed here.

I think it's better to not pay anything before, if you want to pay, pay little amount for the trust, it's actually depends on person to person how they behave particula situations.