Is Freelancer full of Scammers?

Freelancer.com is advertised as a place to have content written for you, or software developed, etc. You can have someone write articles on your topic of choice, or even have bids for mobile apps you have ideas for.

I recently joined Freelancer and hired someone to write something for me.  I paid them about 20 USD to do a financial analysis piece on Kroger’s stock price after it had crashed 30.6% after two sets of bad news on July 15th and 16th. On the 15th Kroger’s management came out with some low expectations due to price cuts and competition from other grocery stores. On the 16th Kroger was hit with news that Amazon was buying Whole Foods. You can imagine the implications this move will have for the entire industry if it parallels the book market or retail sales market in the US. Take Borders and Sears as prime examples, Borders was bankrupted by Amazon and Sears is closing stores around the country in a death spiral towards bankruptcy. Basically what I wanted written is a current evaluation of Kroger as of it’s price drop and a valuation of the company as it stands now. What I got instead was a bunch of words which looked like they were written in a foreign language and freshly presented after a Google Translation!

Below are a few bits from this “native English speaker from England”:

  • The supermarket chain has direct subsidiaries, convenience stores, Jewellery stores, and online retails platform for their customers
  • The prices of groceries have broken the 60 years longest streak by a decline for straight 17 months
  • The discounts offering at Kroger are highly competitive of all its rivals which make it most favorable

In short, the entire article was a piece of trash. I’d rather have a Nigerian prince write my articles for me. A waste of $20, and proof that Freelancers are not who they say they are. This particular Freelancer had over 60 five-star reviews, most likely fake users.

Another story I have, one which thankfully didn’t cost me money, was when I put out a bid for a mobile game app. About 50 bids came back in with various quoted prices. When I contacted some of these bidders, they switched their price from around $300 to $5,000. When I said I’ll think about it, they come back with the standard line “What is your budget”? With swindlers like these I would not trust them to develop an app exclusively for me and not steal it for themselves afterwards. Again, if you think you can outsource work cheaply and turn a profit it’s probably time to look somewhere else besides Freelancer.com.

If anyone using Freelancer has had a good experience with content writing or having apps developed, let me know. For now I’ll avoid them like the plague and maintain thehighestreturn.com as a single author source for information. Once I have more time I’ll do my own mobile apps as well.