About this Blog: Scam Story

This blog started accidentally when I brutally got scammed on freelancer.com.

I was having my summer vacations in 2017 when I started looking for some writing and data entry jobs on freelancer as I had a well established profile on this website. So, after bidding on dozens of projects in a desperate attempt to earn some money for my semester fees; I came across this project.

Judging from the description, I assumed that this could be a new employer looking for writers. As naïve as I was, I not only placed a bid but also agreed to the terms of the project despite the fact that employer seemed quite rude. On the first day of my work, I received this email from the employer who had told me that all the communication will take place through gmail and not through the freelancer website.

Note: The project was not awarded on hourly basis nor did I receive any login details for any website.

Looking at the format of email, all my doubts about this being a scam cleared because everything seemed professional. The email id of this employer ''admin@22tips.com'' was a business id. He/she started sending me loads of assignments as shown in pictures.

I not only worked myself but also had a team (of 2 girls) work on it. We had to write 8-10 articles per day. After a week, I was waiting for my pay but didn’t receive it. On inquiry I got a response saying:

"I don't waste my valuable time repeating things" followed by something like

"All pay has been made to those who sent their work lists and we received no work list from you so no pay for you."

So I was told to work for another week because apparently it was my mistake that I didn’t send the details without being informed that I had to.

Meanwhile, I got another job. The latter was from US and the former was from UK. The second employer named Paul Richardson apparently belonged to edicitera writing firm based in California USA. I searched the company profile on Google and was content about this employer as well. (Yes I know I was stupid). I was told to contact him on skype and upon contacting, he told me that I will be tested with a sample. I passed the test. Then he sent me a thorough professional looking message stating all the terms and conditions.

I had to complete all the assignments within a given time limit. I had to be able to write about 300 words within half an hour on ANY topic. I had to mention my specialties. I would not be paid in advance and the pay was $0.2 per word. I accepted this project and so I wrote articles all day long. Both the employers also asked me to write ‘emergency articles’ like 1000 to 1200 word articles within 2 hours and I did!

I created invoices and by the end of 2 weeks in June I had completed and submitted all these articles with invoice.

And this is the response I got:

I told him (the first employer) that I will not work anymore unless I wasn’t paid the outstanding dues but he was not only uncivilized; he outright refused to pay. Then he/she left a false review on my profile stating lies in a paragraph saying that I never worked on time and provided low quality work etc. That was the end of my patience!

I complained to the freelancer staff but they were unable to help and only assisted me as far as blocking the account of this scammer. They couldn’t even remove that review even after I proved that it was false.

Back to the other one from editcetera. He told me that I will be paid after the weekend, then on Friday of that week and then He vanished. I sent messages but I was blocked.

What I did after that:

•      I rigorously searched for the solutions on Google but the only solution in a case like mine was to involve authorities like lawyers, cybercrime police etc.
•        It could be very costly for me as both the employers were far from my country of residence.
•        Nevertheless, I complained here and here.
•        Then I contacted several groups and pages on facebook for help but none of them was able to give a solid advice on what to do on these matters.
•        I searched for plagiarism in my articles and found the websites where my articles had been published.
•        I tried contacting the so called ‘authors’ of these articles and tried telling them that I was the original author and I wasn’t paid but alas!. I never got a reply from them.
•         I tried contacting some of the high paying websites to accept and publish my remaining articles that were written for as low as $4 per article but until then they also got published somewhere else.
•         I contacted Google and created a comprehensive report in which I attached all the evidences about the authority of those articles and uploaded the articles on my blog as well. I wanted to send DMCA notice to the authors of those websites (where my articles had been published illegally) but Google apologized and said that they could not help me because the evidence was not enough and they could not do anything in cases like these i.e. employer/employee disputes.
•      Then I created accounts on websites like Dotwriter etc and few of the articles were sold but the progress was too slow and paypal is not available in Pakistan!
•      I tried selling my articles on various freelancer groups but people wanted different topics with different word count and format.
•       I uploaded some of them on hubpages and 2 or 3 of them got published and ‘secured’.
•        After exhausting all the avenues I finally contacted hackers…. I asked them if they would help me get my money back which is my right! Warning: Don’t try this at home (or anywhere) ;)

·         So, those hackers were asking for huge amount of sum in advance and I wasn’t even sure that they can do the job so I left it there. (Don’t contact them with your personal id or with your own device and real location). Don’t even bother trying it btw….

What I learned from this experience:

There are some things every freelancer should keep in mind not to get scammed like this; no matter how desperately you need money.

•            Always ask for upfront fee or payment even if it’s as low as 15% of theoriginal. This will let you know that the employer is capable of paying.
•          There are various systems for escrow payment ( Milestones in case of freelancer). You should ask the employers to deposit the funds in escrow and they can release it once you complete the work.
•          Never agree to work on the projects that ask for work in advance and payment later. Even if it’s stated in their terms and conditions.
•          Look for the behavioral cues of the employer. If he/she seems too assertive or ill-tempered and rude, discard them.
•          Do not work for very low wages like $1 per 500 words (yes I have seen and done that in the past as well) unless your English or the required language proficiency is crap.
•          Although I have come across some really good employers with that ‘risky’ behavior of mine but the loss has always been greater than the benefit.
•          The real employers were always polite, gave work in reasonable amounts like 1 to 4 articles per week and paid promptly.
•          Even if the rude employers do pay, don’t work for them because they will prove to be very demanding and they will not pay easily.

What You can do in this situation:

·         First of all, you have to be as quick as possible in taking action. Send a legal notice to the employer if you know their address.
·         If you happen to reside in same area as them, take the case to the small claims court.
·         If you are stuck in a situation like mine. Don’t panic. Create your blog on blogger if you do not already have a website or blog.
·         Post all the articles that you haven’t been paid for on the blog and do as he says in this video. Make sure you follow these steps otherwise your blog will not be indexed by Googlebot.
·         When you submit the sitemap as mentioned in this video. Make sure you change the
u     user-agent* Disallow to Allow. Otherwise your site will not get crawled. Don't worry it's really easy.
·         After that create a Hub pages account and upload all the articles there with the corrections and changes they ask for.
·         If any of your articles got published on hubpages by your name, you will become the owner.
·         Do not worry about making money at this stage. First you have to make sure that you OWN the articles. You can always sell them later by removing them from your blog or hubpage profile and selling them for reasonable prices.
·         If you have paypal available in your area; Dotwriter is a good website for selling articles.
·         Last but not the least, this may sound a bit unethical but if you suspect that an employer may be a scammer and they also abuse you like mine did. Do not confront them or fight with them (because that doesn’t work). Just embed a “keylogger” in the next word file you send to them. They will definitely download that file and the keylogger will get installed on their PC. Create a separate e-mail id for keylogger ‘activities’.
·         Don’t do it if you are impatient or the employer seems slightly annoyed. These kinds of things should be kept for extreme cases.

·         For more information on keylogger and how it works you should Google it and do some research. :p

Finally, I will be adding all My articles with titles and the respective links of the websites they have been posted on in my next blog post.  Although I did not get any kind of credit for my hard work, neither the girls did but I still own that. That’s MY content.