Freelancer.com had some ethical problems in the United States a few years ago. Its problems actually had some educational value. Americans certainly don't think our business world is a model of honesty, but we have succeeded in eradicating some practices that are still common in some countries. The trouble with us is that when Americans hear that it's even possible for agents to collect bribes for recommended workers to clients, while trying to suggest to the clients that their recommendations are based on skill or experience, only some of us think "We must keep these scam artists out of our country. Some of us think "Oh, I want to do that too!" and we have no real system for keeping these people out of responsible jobs that call for a healthy ethical sense.
Freelancer is undeniably a big site, with lots of gigs for writers to pick and choose. When I heard that they'd been radically reorganized, I signed up there again. Not because I've been able to forgive them for failing to pay me $35 in 2017. I have not. No representative of the company has sent me $35, plus a peace offering of approximately (the amount owed) multiplied by (the number of days it took the offender to pay up), plus a letter of abject apology. Forgiveness begins with repentance. But had Freelancer even seen the error of its ways?
It took a while to find out. New Freelancer seemed to have lots of gigs but 95% of the gigs advertised seemed to be part of the Telegram Scam, where (violating all the site rules) the alleged client wanted to pay via Telegram if the freelancer would just put all their bank information on that site. Oh sure.
Just to keep the tradition of legitimate online business alive, I recommend never telling anyone anything beyond your business name and mail drop address before you've converted $500 in payments to cash.
And it'd be nice if our government cracked down on online money handling services, allowing them to operate as a nonprofit service only on condition that they have ONLY mail drop information about users, that they make NO attempt to trace who's receiving payment for what (leave law enforcement to those authorized to do it, in the event that a warrant is issued)m and that they process all payments within 24 hours or pay the amount owed over again for every day of delay. The debacle of Paypal's threatening to dip into people's accounts needs to be a wake-up call. No online business has any credibility with real people until Paypal (and Venmo, which is effectively the same business) have been brought to heel.
When I signed on with New Freelancer, I specifically told them that I was in the Paypal walkout and Freelancer would need to establish credibility by PROMPTLY mailing checks. They said they would.do that. (Famous Last Words.)
It took more than six months to find a legitimate client who was in the United States, so Freelancer couldn't use fluctuations in the exchange rate as an excuse for not paying, and who agreed to pay exactly $100. The client had originally wanted to pay by the hour. If I'd held him to a per-hour arrangement he would have paid a good deal more than $100. That's not a problem but it does explain why the client was willing to cover the first unanticipated gouge on the part of Freelancer, when the site announced that, oh, wait, they now collected fees from both the client and the freelancer so they couldn't send the $100 yet. The client paid the extra fee, willingly, but Freelancer took several weeks to register that fact.
I had other things to do while Freelancer dawdled on processing the client's payment. When I checked the site again, it rolled out a notice that the site was now required to withhold 25% tax from everybody, so now that they'd finally got around to recording the $100 payment, they were only willing to send $75. There was some idiocy about how they'd refund the tax withheld if they had complete tax information.
Oh, sure. And if I believed that, I'm sure their next offer would have been to apply my tax refund to the Brooklyn Bridge.
This was a test project, and the work was worth doing in any case...but no agency should be allowed to get away with this kind of gouging and cheating.
Meanwhile, New Freelancer is now aggressively pushing a scheme whereby the site recommends workers to clients as if those workers were known to be the most experienced, best reviewed by clients, top scorers on tests, etc., but actually their "preferred" workers are the ones who have paid them bribes, or promised to do so. I'm not sure how that system works because all I, personally, want to know about any "recommendations" that begin with paying a bribe to the recommender is that I don't want them. My brand is built on actual clients' reviews. Like most Americans, I'm proud to say that I've never bribed anyone to recommend me and I never will.
It occurred to me that people whose online business is legitimate and ethical might need a scam watch site, like the Better Business Bureau in a real town, to monitor sites that don't pay promptly. We need to make it easy for clients to see which agencies recommend workers based on their record of actual work, and which accept bribes...in a global free market, there is no reason why any job site should expect to survive a report that it considers payment from workers as a basis for recommending them. Agencies can legitimately rank new, unproven workers' scores on objective tests of things like math or grammar, but those tests must be free of charge--I'm not sure that the agencies shouldn't be required to pay workers for the time they spend taking tests.
We should pay particular attention to ensuring that no person working for the kind of wages online gigs usually pay has to pay any kind of third-party money-handling fees. If the client can't deliver cash, the client should cover check cashing services' fees, automatically, even if the worker does choose to use a bank.
Individual "freelancers" can and should keep clients, especially bulky corporate clients, living in fear of having a "slow pay" or "no pay" label attached to their brands. In an ideal world, government would freeze incoming payments to the offending companies until the workers were paid for work done, but for many people the whole point of working online is not having to document the hours that can easily be spent waiting on other people to do their part of one job when online workers could quite happily be doing another job. But we could freeze the offending companies' credibility.
Then again, maybe Al Gore's horrible Future was the only one the corporations that built the Internet want to allow the Internet to have. Maybe we can't maintain the ideal of everyone being able to transact legitimate business online. Maybe we should just get out of the whole Net and let it collapse, leaving the greedheads who want to use the Internet for censorship, gossip, spying, cheating, and fraud to wallow in their losses. Maybe that's the only way to do a market correction on the Internet.
What do you think, Gentle Readers?
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