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Can someone with experience explain how freelancer.com works and how the account holds work?

gungoman 9y ago
basically you get a job from there, client makes a project offer, you accept the project from their interface and your funds go in escrow. Except sometimes the support people there feel like taking 30$ and 50$ here and either make up excuses or straight up take your cash without explaining themselves.
mantas 9y ago
Account hold usually means that the person cannot withdraw their funds. According to this text, it looks like "on-hold" accounts cannot start new projects too. Effectively last step before the complete ban and a nice way to say GTFO.
BoorishBears 9y ago
It works in a way that’s built to maximize profits for Freelancer.com, and that’s about it. You pay up front to cover fees on a project, and hold money for a period before you can transfer it out. So you can end up paying them a percentage of your pay without getting paid yourself if the transfer doesn’t happen. I recall doing a small job and had a dispute opened after it was over. It was a relatively small sum of money so i didn’t even respond to the dispute (figured the person was running a scam and just told myself not to use the site again). Almost 2 months later I get a message telling me the dispute fell in my favor... but then the transfer to my bank account blocked for weeks. Eventually I was told the account holder had been “hacked” sometime during the 2 months (I guess that’s one way to get out of paying for stuff), so the money probably sits in my account to this day. The only way to transfer it is to get the original account holder to reconfirm, but obviously they’re long gone. The way I see it is you have to remember that Freelancer.com is out to make themselves money. At the start of a job charge for a small deliverable that covers the fees of the job so that you’re not losing time and money if a job falls through. And although it’s against the rules, strive to get contracts out of Frelancer’s site. Freelancer in theory has protections for you that you’re losing, but in reality those protections are almost always defaulted to not pay out a job to you. And definitely don’t make a living out of the site. It’s like making a living on eBay, you don’t want to make a living on a site where a robot can end your access with little human recourse.

basically you get a job from there, client makes a project offer, you accept the project from their interface and your funds go in escrow. Except sometimes the support people there feel like taking 30$ and 50$ here and either make up excuses or straight up take your cash without explaining themselves.

mantas 9y ago

Account hold usually means that the person cannot withdraw their funds. According to this text, it looks like "on-hold" accounts cannot start new projects too. Effectively last step before the complete ban and a nice way to say GTFO.

BoorishBears 9y ago

It works in a way that’s built to maximize profits for Freelancer.com, and that’s about it. You pay up front to cover fees on a project, and hold money for a period before you can transfer it out. So you can end up paying them a percentage of your pay without getting paid yourself if the transfer doesn’t happen. I recall doing a small job and had a dispute opened after it was over. It was a relatively small sum of money so i didn’t even respond to the dispute (figured the person was running a scam and just told myself not to use the site again). Almost 2 months later I get a message telling me the dispute fell in my favor... but then the transfer to my bank account blocked for weeks. Eventually I was told the account holder had been “hacked” sometime during the 2 months (I guess that’s one way to get out of paying for stuff), so the money probably sits in my account to this day. The only way to transfer it is to get the original account holder to reconfirm, but obviously they’re long gone. The way I see it is you have to remember that Freelancer.com is out to make themselves money. At the start of a job charge for a small deliverable that covers the fees of the job so that you’re not losing time and money if a job falls through. And although it’s against the rules, strive to get contracts out of Frelancer’s site. Freelancer in theory has protections for you that you’re losing, but in reality those protections are almost always defaulted to not pay out a job to you. And definitely don’t make a living out of the site. It’s like making a living on eBay, you don’t want to make a living on a site where a robot can end your access with little human recourse.