FreelancerReviews 20,144

Serious WARNING To all the Internet users: Stay away from this website. It's a pure SCAM.

They have blocked my money in the account and don't allow me to withdraw. My withdrawal requests are being cancelled one after another.

I've created 2 tickets and sent more than 30 emails to the support department(if you can call it support) but they never got back to me and never explained why they have blocked(stolen) my money.

They close all the tickets and don't have any intention to reply my messages at all. Also, their chat support operators are very irresponsible and impolite.

I'm thinking of taking a legal action against this SCAM company.

STAY AWAY FROM freelancer.com OR YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MONEY.

I was open an account several weeks ago and i posted my first job. I have offices in Manila, Frankfurt/Main and London for web development. Sometimes when we overloaded with work we hire freelancers. I hired a freelancer for a translation job and paid the money to freelancer that they can pay her. U know what happen? After they paid the girl the limited my account and the account from the freelancer girl. We did a verification but they were asking to many private stuff. I told freelancer that is privacy. So what they did. The suspended the freelancer account and i got my money back on my freelancer account. Yeah u thinks is all ok! Haha now the $#*!ing story began. They told me after 48 hours my account is open and i can transfer my money to my paypal. But after more than 130 hours nothing happens. Freelancer.com is a big scam! They take money from clients and u never get it back! Thats how freelancer.com make money!
No more in my life the big scam freelancer.com!

I am working some years with Guru and Elance and i never had one problem with them! So guys when u dont want to lost your money and waste your time open an account on Elance or Guru or Odesk. But please not freelancer.com!

Freelancer Took $710 AUD from my bank account. You know what is showing as my balance? Its -$40 USD (Minus $40).
This site is complete Bull$#*!.

Let me explain:
When I setup a 1st Milestone:- Their system asked me to make a payment to fund a milestone, from available option i picked Direct Deposit and make a payment to their HSBC account in Australia.

Later I found out that they also automatically withdraw money from my Paypal account too. So hence i ended up making double payments.

When i tried to reverse the automatic payment from Paypal, I found that my freelancer account was limited and all i left was with -$40 USD.

Their milestone setup process lead me to make a double payment, if i was told that payment is already taken from paypal then i would have not make a second payment via direct deposit.

So basically they stole my $709.90 AUD. And I still owe them $40 according to their books.

How can they rip us off like this? How can we take action against this?

Stay away from this website, they're scammer. They let their freelancers worked for the clients and then once they have a lot of money in their account, they would blocked the account under pretence of Money Laundering Act. They would pocket the money for themselves and leave their freelancers high and dry.

They also scammed clients on Freelancer.com. Whenever you create a project or contest, they automatically preselect some of expensive features that you may or may not want. If you accidently missed one of the preselect features, you will be charged $33 per feature. When you try to contact them to cancel, they said it's not refundable. So they're doing it on purpose to make money off unsuspecting clients.

I'll use ODesk now.

I posted a project (data collection from a wiki 10k lines), found a freelancer that was very confident that he could complete it in less than a day. After awarding him the project he gave me a sample set of data, the data looked good. About an hour later he said "done", I was amazed. I sampled the data he gave me (about 2% of it) and it all appeared to be valid. I released the milestone of the full amount of money (here's what I did wrong). I then realized that the data was copied and pasted over and over and that he only delivered a small section of the data that the project required. After asking him about it, I got a response "I'll look at it when I get home"... Fast forward 3 days of me trying to contact the freelancer with no response, I contact freelancer.com support to see if they can do anything about it, they say no. I put in a dispute with paypal because "not recieving the goods or services that you purchased" is a valid reason for a dispute. This instantly locks my freelancer.com account. I then post a review about the person and the situation he put me in. He appears all of a sudden, starting to blackmail me that I better remove the poor rating, or he'll have my account deleted. But if I do remove the rating, he'll actually give me the completed project data. I refused to be blackmailed and agreed that if I got the project data completed I would cancel the paypal dispute. Nothing came out of this, he is still sending me verbally abusive and harassing messages. So I contacted Freelancer.com support to see if they could intervene in the verbal abuse and harassment and was told that they don't have access to private messages and there's no way to block anyone. This may be a $70 life lesson to do more research on a site before you invest time or money into it. I'm left $70 less in my bank account and a project that isn't completed.

Freelancer.com is a nightmare. They are holding my money for some reason, its error after error trying to withdraw it, numerous tickets to speak to the 'support' team who are incapable of offering support if they get around to answering, often the ticket is just cancelled and i have to go the process again and again. The only emails i get are saying you have placed a ticket (yes i know) none to say if its been answered or not. Over two weeks later, I am at my wits end. There is no phone number to call and that says a lot; a company devoid of professional ethics would need to avoid the onslaught of complaints. They took over the excellent vWorker site half way through a large writing job I was on, hence I am with a company that charges monthly buy offers nothing in return. All other sites do not charge and have great customer support. Avoid this company like the plague, Elance, Interact Media and many others are a better bet for your freelancing needs, as employer or employee. I am uncertain what to do, they have not answered a mail in days, there shows that there is no money in my account (should be $2,500) and that there is no pending withdrawal. Be careful.

We used freelancer.com to try to find a person to complete our e-commerce site. We had a project budget of $500-700. We found a freelancer to complete the project, and we paid $150 for what they call a milestone payment. The person working never did any work on our site. He kept sending us emails telling us to send him money outside of paypal because the company takes too much out and he didnt have a credit card linked with paypal. Knowing this was in violation (and very shady) we felt uneasy to continue working with both freelancer.com, and the person who won the bid on our project. Seeing as NO work was completed on our site, we asked for a refund of the $150 originally paid. Freelancer said they do not offer refunds, and that we would have to find another person to complete the project through their site. In the meantime they locked us out of our account, and there is no one to talk to. Three weeks in dealing with these people we now have to open a paypal dispute. These people are total scammers and a complete waste of time and money. I would FIND ANOTHER COMPANY!

I have the same bad experience as a lot of other users. I signed a Paypal billing agreement to pay a worker I hired through freelancer.com. And now, more than 1 year later, they all of a sudden started to automatically charge my Paypal account for a paid membership I never asked for.

I have not used my account for over a year and now they start stealing my money by abusing the billing agreement.

Over a year ago I found a great coder and a great designer through freelancer.com and I was a happy customer. Until this happened! So be warned before you sign a billing agreement with them!

Firstly, I just started using it frankly, and this is my first job I posted. However, I sent a milestone payment to the awardee and he never received it. I have since reposed the job and awarded it back to him and sent another milestone payment of the same amount for him to get started on my job. I received a call minutes after I made the first deposit asking me to verify that I was the person sending the money. So I felt secure from that point. However, now i'm trying to locate the first milestone that seems to be floating around in cyberspace, so that it can be redeposited to my account but I cannot find a phone number to call to sort this out.

In addition to that my Paypal account was debited for $17 and there seems to be a subscription that I didn't sign up for for $4.95 monthly to use the site.

Has anyone been successful at reaching them by phone?

I would be very careful using this service. They offer no type of protection against thieves who are out to rip you off. So if you get tricked by a rip off artist on here don't expect Freelancer to do anything about it. They basically told me the only way they can refund the amount that was ripped off from me was if the guy who ripped me off verified the milestones I setup. Why would he verify, let alone even reply if he is ripping me off? He won't. And even with all the verification they need right there at their finger tips they still won't refund the money nor will they take any action against the person who is ripping me and others off.

Make sure you read all the fine print because this site harbors a ton of rip off artists and apparently their policies are setup to protect them, which makes me wonder if freelancer is simply a big rip off as well. We pay for the service when we finish projects and freelancer gets paid off our projects, yet they won't do anything to help users acquire the money they've had stolen from them...

Very disappointed in this "venue" as they call it...

They are a scam site... So far I have won two projects. Freelancer has taken my money and I have not heard from the employers after weeks of pms to them. When I contact freelancer.com support all they will say is no refunds. They do not protect their freelancers. Honestly, I think they award projects just so they can get the fees from the freelancer and rip them off.

The first project I was awarded, I was sleep when the award came. I made the bid at 9 p.m. My time and was awarded the project at 2 am my time. I woke up and accepted the project at 6 am. They say you have 36 hours to accept the project it only took me four. The project got reposted and they chose another developer in that after they chose me on the first post. I contacted support and they just said sorry, no refunds talk with your employer. I talked to them and they didn't do anything.

I said okay, lesson learned... never had an experience like this with scriptlance.com. It was a bad first impression with the but I decided to give them another chance. I was awarded another $30 project. I accepted the project and of course they took their fee right away. The employer has still not contacted me and I have sent many messages. Again they say sorry no refunds. It seems as if they make up these projects just to make money illegally and I pray their downfall will be imminent

Totally oriented towards their profit and doesnt care about customers.

Their email support is one of the worst I've seen in the past 15 years of using internet. They just respond like they have a match to play and like they have a target to achieve by responding within 2-3 hours of receiving my questions. Then the response I get on almost all of the tickets is incomplete. Then, I have to have at least two more rounds of emails so that I can get what I need. They truly truly lack proper professional approach and customer support. Imagine if companies were giving support like this in an airplane, or imagine if Apple was giving this kind of support? Can you imagine? I cannot.

They introduce new features affecting business. The sole purpose of the features is so that they make more money.

I don't know why people are rating Freelancer.com negatively. I have worked for a few people who hired me through Freelancer, and it has worked out very well. The milestone payment system ensures you get paid and contractors do not run away with your money. It is when people try to avoid paying money to the website and arrange to get paid through Paypal etc. directly that problems can arise.
The support team is pretty prompt with replies, though there have been times they could no resolve technical trouble I had with the website...
I would recommend Freelancer.com as a good place to find work online.

freelancer.com is a scam and a fraud company. Stay away from this place.
I have contacted paypal because paypal is a party of this scamming theft company.
Paypal knowingly knows that this company is a fraud yet paypal collects money for freelancer. Paypal and freelancer are in to ripoff people.

I am going to drive to San Jose and file a police report against paypal and freelancer for theft.
*******@sydney.edu.au,
Phone +(612) 9279 3305
Call and contact the CEO matt barrie in australia to refund your money.

Here is
MR MATT BARRIE
External Lecturer
Office
Room, Building J03
Address
School of Electrical and Information Engineering
University of Sydney, NSW, 2006
Australia
Phone
+(612) 9279 3305
Fax
+(612) 9351 3847
Email
*******@sydney.edu.au