UPDATE 05/29/2016:
The gentlemen who had his money disappear from his Fiverr account still has not received anything back yet. This morning Fiverr did say that he would need to wait another five days though. Usually, when companies do this, it’s a stalling tactic hoping to placate the aggreived party, but as this has happened to countless other people who have contacted us since we published this story, we will be running their stories too.
We’ve reached out to Fiverr for comments, but as they are not responding, we are not reaching out to their investment group Square Peg Capital to see if they would have time for a comment on what’s happening at Fiverr. Our next article being investigated is seeing just save buyers are on Fiverr and if you have a story to share, you can reach out to us on our Contact Us section.
In a true case of irony Fiverr, the low-cost marketplace services site was hit on Friday by a DDoS attack after removing listings on their site offering those such services. While some at the company are saying this is a one time issue, a look back shows that it’s had its share of reported outages in the past year alone.
There have been at least 12 long-time outages for Fiverr in the past year, averaging over one per month starting from August 2016. Many customers, a few former employees and a couple of people working there presently admit that this has been a growing problem with the website for quite some time.
“The infrastructure at Fiverr has grown so unstable that this was bound to happen,” one former employee said, which was verified by the current ones. “I’m shocked this hasn’t happened sooner. Sadly, the people there won’t learn anything from this, and the customers will be the ones having to pay for their hubris.”
One of the biggest issues that seems to be a thorn for buyers at Fiverr is the heavy influx of scammers. We spoke to several customers who’ve lost money to these people to see how Fiverr reacted to their problems.
“You would think that Fiverr would care about the buyers on their site, but they seem to really care more about the sellers. I dealt with one seller who told me that I was wasting my time if I posted a true negative comment about them as they would have Fiverr take it off. I was shocked to see that they were telling the truth. Even after I contacted Customer Support at Fiverr about this, I never heard anything back. I tried several times but when they never bothered getting back I realized that the scam seller was right. I did a search on Fiverr and even found gigs on there to help sellers get rid of their negative feedback.”
This same complaint has been lodged by countless buyers on the marketplace website where you can buy most anything for just $5 dollars. Of course, there are plenty of upcharges to make that claim false when it comes time to checkout, but most sellers start at that point.
A recent Fiverr customer contacted us about an issue he had in the past week. It seems he placed an order for a gig costing over $300 dollars for a seller with a sterling 5-star rating. That’s the best you can get on Fiverr, so he thought that it was a trustworthy one. After the seller marked the gig complete when they hadn’t even started it, his Spidey sense came into play.
On Fiverr, a seller can mark a job as complete whether they’ve completed it or not. If the buyer doesn’t reject the order within 3 days, Fiverr will assume it was completed, and the scam seller gets the money. Many past customers have said that once that happens, you can kiss your money goodbye. Many customers also don’t realize that there’s a reject button so they contact the seller asking when it will be completed, and the seller tells them in just a few days pushing the clock.
With this customer, he was able to hit the Reject button, which puts things on hold until the seller can complete the order. He contacted Fiverr immediately about this to let them know about the situation. He also let Fiverr know that this was the eleventh time he had encountered a scammer, and they didn’t sound at all surprised or concerned. Yesterday, the seller suddenly turned their sales page off and made their profile private, so he asked Fiverr to cancel the gig.
They did cancel it, but he was on the hook for their ‘processing fee,’ which was nearly $20 and he was told that he wouldn’t get that back. He requested to have the money reimbursed to his Paypal account and the Customer Service person named Hugo let him know that they would be doing that for him. Imagine his surprise when he checked his Paypal account to only be reimbursed for $10.50. That wouldn’t even cover the processing fee Fiverr made him lose.
So today, Friday, he has tried contacting their Customer Service department three times to no avail. Suddenly, they are no longer responding to him. When he tried leaving a message on the Fiverr Customer forum, he was told by the person on there that they doubted Fiverr’s Customer Service department even cared about them owing that money to one of their customers. They are just saying that Fiverr has other issues right now, and Customer Service obviously isn’t one of them as you can see from the discussion above.
A quick Google search for “Fiverr Fraud or Scams” brings up countless pages of issues and these two sites confirm what many present and previous customers have been saying about the sit.
http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.fiverr.com
http://www.reviewopedia.com/fiverr-com-reviews
In full disclosure, we have used Fiverr in the past and actually found 2 of our great writers from there, but after experiencing so many scammers ourselves, we stopped using it. Having to spend so much time wading through a sea of scammers is just too much work as many customers have attested to. Like many sites, Fiverr began as a great idea, but sadly it seems that it’s become the proverbial prison where the inmates have taken over.
As anyone knows with a business, the way that a company’s Customer Service Department treats its customers in times of crisis is the best measure of any company. Today, as they’ve been doing for quite some time now, Fiverr has failed badly.