Elance.com is fraudsters paradise, it lures unsuspecting individuals and businesses into finding freelancers for specific jobs, sure it looks good and legitimate, but as soon as you have taken the bait and believed the so called lie of adding milestones and using escrow payments to be a safe method of payment, it will be too late just to be told the freelancer has been suspended and there’s nothing they can do, even though payments have been made which can range from 100’s of dollars to the 1000’s of dollars, then comes the interesting point of try to contact customer service which virtually non existent.
more and more individuals and businesses are coming forward with growing numbers of unrest, its time to learn from other people mistakes ” a wise man is a man who learns from others mistakes”. so be wise and:
DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY AND DO NOT PAY UPFRONT FOR ANY FREELANCE SERVICE YOU USE NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY
Denisa
Massachusetts,#2Consumer Comment
Tue, August 04, 2015
I've hired two freelancers and they both took my money without doing any work, then their accounts disapeared. They had stelar reputation on Elance, but used duplicate accounts to scam me. I reported the the scams before the first milestone (within a week of me sending my payment). The first scammer was an account named Gee Gee (Gemiano) from China. A comment apeared on his account from a previous scammed client right after I released my advance to him. So I immediately requested a refund and flagged that account to Elance. Despite the fact that this guy was clearly scamming me, they asked me to file a dispute. I just read their policy for Disputes: they send this to Arbitration and charge "each party" almost $300 if the scammer "does not respond to their phonecalls. In other words, I'll be charged to get my money back - cause the scammer is clearly not stupid enough to acctually pay that.
The other scammer is Killol D (Killol Desai) - from India. I advanced him $1000.00 for a job - since he seemd legitimate (LinkedIn profile, good comments on Elance etc). Since the second day into the project I heard nothing from him. One week into the project I notified Elance and Upwork that this user has multiple fake accounts. He used his legitimate one to contact me and then signed up for the project with a fake account. This is against the policy of both Elance and Upwork. They, once again, asked me to file a dispute. His account with good comments is still up and he is still taking jobs. I am unable to post a comment on that profile to warn other clients.
Furthermore, Elance has discouraged me from filing a dispute from the credit card I used to pay these two scammers.
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