What's wrong with the Freelancing industry

What's wrong? I'll tell you whats wrong. The big corporations with their profit at all cost mentality is what's wrong! Of course the same is true for so many things wrong today.

A bit over 10 years ago I jumped into the realm of working from home, coding PHP, PERL and BASH, writing articles, doing some LINUX sysadmin stuff etc. It wasn't easy, but there were a few good websites that made it a lot easier to not only find the work, but they also had measures in place to protect coders and clients from trying to scam one another.

In exchange for the service provided to coders and their clients, these "few good freelance sites" took a small cut of the money the coder earned once the project was completed and the client paid for the work. Life was good, work was plentiful and everybody won.

Well, not anymore. Since then the big fish have bought out and buried the little fish so coders like me are left with almost no choice on whom to do business with. However, it's not enough for these big fish to have a monopoly. Nope they want to squeeze every nickel out of the people that earn them money.

Take one predominant player in the realm for example. FreelancerDOTcom (who I'll refer to as FLC from here on) bought two of my favorite freelance websites, ScriptlancerDOTcom & RentACoderDOTcom along with several others, not only getting the business, but the coders and clients involved in those sites as part of the purchase.

Had FLC retained the business model those 2 other sites used, I wouldn't be writing this, but nope, FLC had to go the profit at all costs route and milk the people that earn them money for even more.

First, the old expression it takes money to make money has never been more true. Freelancers like me need to pay just to accept the work. Yes that's right, coders pay up front before being paid by their respective clients and of course FLC skims off of that transaction too. It simply does not make sense to anyone but the corporate big wigs behind it. Freelance coders are being charged for the "privilege" of earning FLC money. It doesn't matter what your track record is, how many years you've been completing projects and creating satisfied return clients etc. YOU PAY FIRST in order to earn.

But wait, there is more to this utterly asinine business model. Freelancers who accept a project have no way out of it. There is no way to cancel and even if you manage to get high enough up the food chain to have a project cancelled on your behalf, the fee you paid is NON-REFUNDABLE. In my entire Freelancing career I have had to cancel 2 projects out of hundreds. It doesn't matter. The 10% FLC immediately charges is theirs permanently, even if the client's "job" turns out to be illegal and in violation of international trade laws. It doesn't matter. They got your money and you won't be getting it back.

I used to mention Freelance sites that I liked here. Well I can't think of any now. So I suppose I'll have to change perspectives.

Freelancers, you would do well to avoid FLC..

Clients looking for freelancers to put to work are also advised to avoid FLC. The coders on FLC pay to be able to accept your work, and the bulk of the "qualification badges" you might see on their profile were purchased too. They mean nothing other than they bribed the outfit correctly and through proper channels. All it takes is a few bucks to get one and they say absolutely nothing about the freelancers "skill".

How can freelancers protect themselves from scamming clients?

Those that know me, know I've been a freelance web developer off & on for the majority of the last 13 years. Over that time, I thought I had learned the appropriate steps to take to prevent myself from getting ripped off. Well, it would seem I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was.

I take great interest in helping small & family owned businesses to create an effective web presence. In the past I've even offered to do the work for free, at extremely low hourly rates or for a small percent of future sales, as was the case in this lesson I recently learned.

In this case, I was asked to resurrect a website that appeared to be originally authored around 2003, using WYSIWYG editors such as Netscape Composer, and later M$ Frontpage. There was no rhyme or reason to the site's navigation, directory/file structure etc. Image files were not at all optimized and the site was just riddled with mistakes both visible and in the underlying code. Clearly a novice web master had gotten in over their head, created a site that was impossible to maintain, and doing very poorly in terms of search engine performance. I thought, great ! I can fix this !

Once I had the bulk of their "content" ported over to a bright and shiny installation of Wordpress, I put it up on their web server and started to address my many marketing concerns. So I asked the client to confirm himself as owner of the business on the Yelp page that already had the bulk of their business information. The phone number and location were no longer current, but in my mind, the most important part, the URL to the website was correct. I also asked the client for a PSD Photoshop file of their logo, since they had mentioned it was "done professionally", I would expect them to retain the PSD file for later use.

That was when the red flags started waving vigorously in the winds of deceit that I started to sense. They didn't have a PSD file of their logo, only PNG, JPG and BMP versions of the same logo making the touch-ups they were requesting impossible. They also said they couldn't claim the Yelp entry as their own, they weren't at that address any more, and the phone number had since changed. I suggested a new phone number to Yelp, and asked the client to try the "Claim my business" process again. Their response "it didn't work". So, I requested they create a new Yelp account. They blatantly refused and asked "Why is that such a big deal?". Clearly any legitimate business owner is not going to respond this way when offered free marketing. So I responded with something similar to "verify yourself as the legitimate business owner or I'm not going to continue the work" They responded by changing the FTP password to their server, and changing the "author" password for the Wordpress account I had created for them.

I contacted them shortly after, asking why the FTP password was changed, pointing out it made it difficult to get to the unoptimized images, optimize them and re-upload them.. when in fact I really didn't need it. No response. I waited a day, still no response.

So, after nearly 48 hours of silence I logged into Wordpress as admin, and went about deleting all the pages and posts I had made, and then emptied the trash. Then I edited the child theme I had tailored to execute some PHP which deleted the optimized images I had created, and then tweaked it to become inoperable. As a final step, I switched the Wordpress theme to ugliest I could find and made a single post, a series of links I had found when investigating the company and clients name.

Turns out this outfit has been involved in something called a Phoenix scam since 2003. In 2006 they were convicted of fraud. The Phoenix scam falls into the "Long Con" realm of cons and is named such because the company rises, does some legitimate work offering extremely generous warranties then claims bankruptcy, making the warranties and future contracts void. The "owner" then sells the company to a co-conspirator who raises the company from the ashes, and does the same thing again.

Apparently I was the unfortunate web developer tasked with helping with the third rising of this Phoenix. Once I realized what was happening, I swiftly clipped it's wings. I lost a lot of time for which I will never be paid, but at least I didn't become an unknowing accomplish to these scammers. As a result, I've amended my rule book.

1. If the client does not have a "confirmed" Yelp page , require them to claim their business before doing ANY work at all.
2. Do some basic Google searches to ensure that client provided content is not copied from a "competing" website. Copy a few long sentences from their text and see if you can find it identically on other sites by wrapping it with quotes.
3. Look at the headers of their emails and glean the originating IP address of the sender. Use a free service like IP2Location.com to ensure they are at least near the region they claim to be in. If the originating IP address is in a private range like 10.0.0.0, or 192.168.0.0, be very suspicious and act accordingly.
4. Do the bulk of the work on your own server and do not place it on the clients server until you have been paid at least 50% of the agreed price.
5. Have a backup plan to cripple the site, but leave it in a restore-able state, in the event the client doesn't pay in full. In the case above, keeping the Wordpress Admin password to myself served that purpose. To ensure I could restore the content in the event my suspicions were wrong, I should have used the Wordpresses built in "export" widget, but by that point I was 100% certain I had called it correctly.

It's embarrassing to admit I almost fell for this, but if it saves a community from getting scammed again, and/or another freelancer from the turmoil I went through.. It's worth it.