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This is starting to sound like how Paypal is today...

• mattbarrie 12y ago
  Both my site (Freelancer.com) and Paypal have similar issues. Both are subject to fraud on a daily basis, and we have to weigh up the security of our marketplace and the protection of our users versus customer support issues that become public very quickly in today's world.
• hga 12y ago
  I see a qualitative difference between the two: When Paypall's fraud detection flags an account, their repeated demands for more and more "documentation" are clearly not in good faith, they have no intention whatsoever in immediately unfreezing your account, they want you to do one of two things that will address their risk of chargebacks: Refund all the money in question; this can work for charity efforts, which look suspicious, a whole bunch of money flooding into an account all of a sudden. In that case, the donations can quickly go back and be funneled to another charity. Or wait 180 days to get your money. Of course you have the third option of appealing to social media et. al., which can work particularly well in the charity situation. For Freelancer.com, they obviously don't turn the crank on their Know Your Customer (KYC) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer) process until there's money on the table. Many, probably most freelancers who sign up will probably never reach this point, either because they don't get a job, or the client stiffs all concerned. However, once that necessary action was triggered, if we are to believe Dustin, Freelancer.com's KYC unit was grossly incompetent. Heck, they might be lying to the CEO about what happened ... but he's ultimately responsible for all this.