Comment by mattbarrie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbarrie | Hacker News Reader

Hello

I am the Chief Executive Officer of Freelancer.com and I have personally investigated this situation.

While I sympathise with Dustin's situation, he has failed to complete our Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which involves the provision of bona fide photo identification. We take the security of our marketplace and the protection of our users very seriously and have robust checks and balances in our anti-fraud procedures.

I have looked at all the details for this case, and our support team have done exactly the right thing in this instance.

We have decided to refund all funds associated with the project back to the employer's credit card (who is also located nearby in New York) as well as all fees associated with this. The employer has been called and informed that he will need to pay Dustin directly.

We will also be investigating the nature of this project further.

Thank you also to those of you that took the time to email me to bring this personally to my attention. My email address is matt@freelancer.com and I am happy to receive emails about any issue, even if it is to just drop me a note saying hello.

Regards Matt

EDIT: Let me add that we accept driver's licenses as identification: http://www.freelancer.com/news/articles-verification-309.htm...

I appreciate that you're here to answer questions, Matt. Two questions if you're still around:

1. Are you saying that Dustin lied about submitting a drivers license? His blog post clearly states that he submitted a drivers license. So are you saying he is lying?

2. Why do you allow clients to pay you before you've properly identified the freelancer? That process seems completely backwards and asking for trouble. I would expect that a freelancer would need to verify their identify before they are allowed to even be listed in the marketplace, way before you would accept funds on their behalf.

Hi Angilly

1) I cannot comment on the specifics as I hope you can understand. 2) We don't ID check all the accounts at signup. That would be logistically impossible. We have 11 million users.

Regards Matt

Matt, I refuse to use Freelancer or endorse it until the murky issue regarding the drivers licence is cleared up. Why was it not accepted as valid identification?

That's a very poor answer, Matt. The audience here is a hell of a lot smarter than that (and right now, very skeptical of your business). Showing up here was a nice gesture, but if you're not going to answer questions thoughtfully, it's not going to help you.

By specifying exactly what the verification issue is they likely break trust with users and potentially expose themselves legally.

You're doing it wrong, and we're not going to tell you what you're doing wrong.

You're doing it wrong but we won't publish what you did wrong on an online forum.

I have to agree with what you posted, even though I'd like to know why the provided ID wasn't valid. A voice of reason like this is what the internet needs more of. Unfortunately the majority doesn't seem to understand the concept of objective reasoning.

For this subthread about posting online, I agree, but you realize OP couldn't get an answer on this in private, either?

The customer is claiming their "verification process" is not possible to satisfy, and customer service is non-responsive. If the customer's story is true, the only issue is stupidity on the part of Freelancer.com. All the CEO said is the customer "failed to complete our Know Your Customer (KYC) process" -- ignoring the customer's claims that the process is completely broken and customer service is not providing a way to meet the requirements. If there were more to it, I think Freelancer.com could get away with something like "The customer has not submitted what he said he did." In the absence of that, I think it's reasonable to assume the customer's story is correct and honest, and Freelancer.com has really bungled this and is only digging their hole deeper with form-letter responses on social media.

As for privacy and legal liability, he's already confirmed that someone is a customer, revealed the location (New York) of an employer of said customer, and divulged details about their response to the employer, so ducking behind "privacy" when the crux of the issue is questioned, rings hollow to me.

If there is anything truly wrong about his application details [1], they shouldn't publish that on the open web but deal with it privately. If he publishes his application details that's fine, but if they do they might be liable.

Their real mistakes are: 1) hanging onto his cash and dicking him around because they can't afford to give good support to all 11 million users who depend on their site for income and 2) having such an opaque process that it takes posts to HN to sort his issue out. By comparison, refusing to post his (supposed) application errors when doing so would absolve them doesn't exactly look like a smoking gun.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657942 hints that there might be more to the story. If the support person screwed up, just accept the ID and send him his money. Instead they reversed the transaction, are 'investigating the project further' and are being cagey about details. Assuming they're not idiots, why would they not post the specifics?

More information here[1]. It's interesting that they're giving out so many details now. They indignantly state, "We don't subvert [anti-fraud] processes because a post makes its way to Reddit or HN", yet they apparently don't mind blaming both customers and publicly providing more details about their transactions, when it becomes clear Reddit/HN anger is going to hurt their bottom line.

It seems to boil down to OP possibly oversimplifying in his understandable frustration, and essentially his word against theirs (they say there's a "good reason" his documents were rejected, he says all communication was contradictory and unresponsive, with no reason given for his documents being rejected.) If the communications OP quoted are legitimate, Freelancer deserves the outrage, no matter the exact reason OP couldn't get verified.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663726

By specifying exactly what the verification issue is they likely break trust with users and potentially expose themselves legally.

What could possibly make this form of authentication special in that the process cannot be audited due to "trust," or legal issues?

Audited is fine. Published on the internet, less so. E.g. if there's something wrong with the ID. I can imagine a story "website posts details of user's false identification, user sues because can't get a job".

I'm not defending what they did [1], just saying it's not clearcut that they should publish the specifics of what they were unhappy with about his ID process.

[1] See where I'm obviously against their behaviour here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658177

You're bending over backwards, why would the OP make up a story about sending in their driver's license? If, as speculated, the ID was photographed poorly, the support person could have just said "we need a clear scan" straight off. No muss, no fuss, no disclosure of sensitive details.

I think it's apparent that the CEO is lying in their excuse here.

Poor indeed. While I kind-of appreciate the privacy/legal issues involved, why did Matt say anything at all then? He's already claimed a specific customer didn't meet KYC requirements, has named the locale of the employer (New York), the customer's claims and their responses are quite public on the Facebook page and the OP, so dodging this question just looks like they have something to hide. If the customer didn't exist or was completely misrepresenting the situation, I think it'd be fair game for them to protect themselves by denying his specific allegations. Saying "The customer didn't complete our KYC process" doesn't help at all, when the customer is claiming the KYC process is impossible to complete because of contradictory and unreasonable requirements from the company!

As it stands, I'm not really seeing any other reasonable explanation than that Freelancer.com's customer service is clueless, their KYC department is confused, and they're more concerned about form-letter damage-control responses on social media, than about helping their customer.

You have written this several times but the empirical evidence is that you don't accept them, you seem to have vehemently and repeatedly refused to accept this client's drivers license. Do you not acknowledge that the client's DL was refused? Do you not see how saying "we accept DL's" several times has not helped your reputation at all?

Can you generalise the solution so other Dustins don't have to resort to online fora in future? You seem to have many reasons to hang onto cash while people can't pay their rent. If the customer is happy with the milestone the money is no longer yours and your TOS are now an impediment to reasonable business.

He provided a driver's license, obviously, and you obviously are pretending to "answer" without addressing that. I believe based on this case and many other cases coming up in Google and similar threads that there is a large amount of evidence that Freelancer.com is systematically and deliberately defrauding freelancers and/or outright stealing their money. Or in some cases withholding it long enough to accumulate interest on the money if it can't be stolen outright.

Based on the outpouring of responses to this case, I am certain there will finally be a number of very serious lawsuits.

I am quite glad you decided to come out in the open and expose your fraud to the Hacker News community directly. It will make the litigation much easier.

you matt you lying * of

FREELANCER YOU ARE FULL OF CRAP, YOU HAVE BEEN IGNORING ME FOR A WEEK NOW, REFUSING TO LET ME WITHDRAW MY MONEY FROM MY ACCOUNT, CLAIMING THAT YOU ARE INVESTIGATING MY EMPLOYERn WICH HAS SENT YOU ALL THE REQUIRED DOCS SEVERAL TIME, JUST TO BE IGNORED, YOU ARE LYING TO ME? ABOUT HIS ACTIONS, AND ARE LYING TO HIM, ABOUT MY ACTIONS, YOU OWE ME 600$

AFTER MY PROJECT WAS FINISHED, AND PAYED INTO MY ACCOUNT, YOU REFUSE MY PAYMENT, ANDDO NOT EVEN INFORM MY EMPLOYER.

YOU ARE IGNORING ME ON EMAIL AND TWITTER, YOUR COMPANY IS A BIG HUGE SCAM !!!!

USERNAME ON FREELANCER WHITEWHIDOW !!!

Whitewhidow. I looked into your situation and it has been resolved at our end now.

Thank you for taking the time to take care of this issue, Matt.

How exactly did he handle this issue ?

Form-letter reply to a form-letter response.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657942

Reply on news.ycombinator.com