You may read others stories like mine here:
http://lisaamartin. Wordpress.com/02/24/the-trouble-with-freelancer-com/
1. I paid for a membership at freelancer.com using a credit card.in the amount of 30$
2. A couple days later I realized I was not going to actually use the service. So I requested a refund. The refund was credited to my account rather than my credit card.
3. Freelancer.com billed on to the refund a processing fee of $5.00.
4. At this point I had $25.00 in my freelancer.com account. (which originally and legally should have been credited back to my credit card and not my freelancer.com account.
5. I went to get the funds transferred to my pay pal account. At this point I noticed a disclaimer stating that freelancer.com account holders can not withdraw less than $30.00 at one time.in addition, any first or initial transfer/transactions take up to 15 days to process due to security.
6, In addition, because my freelancer account is set to default in USD currency when I registered I would need to then convert my $25 US into CAN dollars to make the transfer.in doing this freelancers currency converter made my 25$ into 14$ CAN.
7. I was astounded of course and frustrated overall, all I wanted to do was get my money back and move on. But I was/am locked into freelancer.com if I wanted my money back.
8. So I entered a couple contests and won a contest put on by freelancer.com, I won 100$ USD. So, at this point I have 114$ in my freelancer.com account. Which is locked there until the 15 days are up for their so called security check and processing. I am wondering what other fees will be tacked on to this.
7. They billed me a commission charge on the $100.00 I won for a contest they put on internally. Normally they would bill users a commission rate. But I was surprised to learn that they would even bill a commission charge on an internally posted contest. I made a complaint and was refunded the charge (to which I was surprised).
So this is more or less it. During my time with Freelancer.com I read of other members being scammed out money for projects or contests that freelancers had either won or bid on and won. If visit the link above you can read on about the many users of that site that came away with a variety of frustrations.
I think freelancer is operating under a certain guise that the average consumer does not see until they get swindled. Things appear to be in order until people start trying to withdraw money from their accounts or collect money from clients.in addition freelancer has certain policies in effect that might be within legal reason but in moral or honest business practice these policies are not set to serve customers or clients. I read of many people not being able to collect their earnings because freelancer locks accounts for bogus security reasons. Users are being scammed out of money through the website and freelancer.com does not take action on behalf of the user nor do they accept any responsibility for scams on the website.
In addition my own experience where I was swindled out of my refund through careful planning and conjecture of freelancer.com. Because a this point I don't really know for a fact if freelancer.com was bound by law to refund my money to my credit card or if they had just legale cause to refund it to my freelancer.com account.in my mind they should have refunded my credit card, since this was the method of payment in addition if I didn't want the service why would I want the funds to be transferred to my freelancer.com account where I am unable to actually recover them due to freelancers bogus policies.
At any rate I must warn everyone to stay away from freelancer.com whether or not you are an employer or talent looking to gain extra work or money on the side. If you are reading this and have had a similar experience I urge you to voice your experience to agencies like interpol and rip off report, the sooner and more this is done the sooner freelancer.com will cease to exist.
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