Marketplace integrity in jeopardy critical GiG Ranking loophole discovered

[thextremewp]

Note: This is a critical Fiverr bug/loophole. Take action and save your gigs while you still can as nothing can be done to fix this or undo the damage done to your gigs once you get affected due to this.

I’ve discovered a serious loophole in Fiverr where any user can bring a gig down in ranking or completely render a gig useless to the point where no buyer will be able to find it. For example your highly successful gig which was ranking on the 1st page can be pushed down to Fiverr’s last SERPs. This loophole will affect any gig no matter if your gig has 1,000+ raving reviews, is years old with excellent stats or if it’s a relatively new gig.

With the growth of Fiverr marketplace unfortunately some users have resorted to this malice instead of playing fair. These users are deliberately hurting the gigs ranking of other sellers by exploiting this loophole in the Fiverr ranking algorithm and ruining years of hard work of other sellers by effectively pushing them at the bottom of Fiverr SERP.

I’ve spent months on investigating and documenting how this loophole is being abused and unfortunately due to lax or almost no hurdlers this will keep on getting worse. It’s disturbing to know that how they’re gaming the system and anyone’s gig ranking can be stolen like this while at the moment nothing is being done to stop this.

Here’s how this loophole works:

For the past few months I’ve had a couple of ghost orders, where buyers would place an order, start the order without providing the details and then would just disappear without filling any order requirements or they’ll keep on stalling you until the order is extremely late and then you’ll have to either cancel that order or keep waiting for their requirements or worse they’ll make you do some partial work and then disappear so that you won’t be able to cancel that order and they won’t agree to extend order timeline and they won’t cancel the order either until they get their desired results.

Among other goals , which I won’t be discussing in this topic as that merits its own thread their primary goal is to mess up your order stats so that your order’s ranking get affected.

How this loophole impact your Gigs:

Once you get a couple of such ghost orders your gig will get booted from the top Fiverr SERPs. For example if your gig was among the top 10 gigs on the first page of the Recommend page then after 3-5 such orders your gig will get booted to the 3rd or 4th page and the gig’s ranking will continue to decline as these ghost orders build up over time.

Why this loophole is really serious

Unfortunately the way Fiverr algorithm has been designed/re-designed made it really easy for users with malice intent to abuse this loophole in Fiverr ranking algorithm. As most users are aware that this is a real time algo so this abuse affects gigs in real time as there are no fail safes to deter system abuse. All the damage done to your gigs using this ranking loophole will be permanent and even customer support won’t be able to do anything to reverse any ranking damage done to your gigs that was done by exploiting this ranking loophole.

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

So while the impact of this abuse will be immediate for many gigs there isn’t any resolution available.

Is it even financially viable for users to exploit this loophole

Unfortunately it’s extremely viable and profitable as it seems that this is the reason that this gig ranking loophole is being abused in an organized fashion, users are exploiting this loophole for their gains without losing any money and in most cases they are gaining huge financial advantage illegally:

Here’s a complete breakdown of the process that they’re using and how they’re breaking Fiverr’s TOS and yet still staying completely undetected:

1. User with malice intent selects a gig that they want to down rank.

2. User Funds order using their PayPal or credit/debit card so once order gets cancelled Fiverr can refund them back to their payment provider including the service fee. Even in some cases if they don’t get their processing fee back they’ll still get the full order amount back and gig’s ranking still get’s damaged.

3. Users starts the order without filling in requirements and stall the seller until the order is extremely late and the user with the malice intent will then wait until the late red clock starts for you and as the order will now only keep getting late it will keep on down ranking a seller’s gig.

4. After damaging your ranking using the late order loophole they will either initiate the cancellation or wait for you to cancel the order.

5. Once the order gets cancelled the user has effectively completed this loophole cycle to damage your gig’s ranking and your profile stats.

6. Once the cancellation is complete the user gets to walk away without losing any funds at all and they can continue to repeat this process until they have damaged your best selling or a high ranking gig and then their gig or the competitor who has employed the services of such users gets their gig in place where your gig used to be. So this abuse might be used by your own competitors by creating a network of users to take this malice action on their behalf to make it difficult for Fiverr to track them back.

7. A same user won’t repeat this process with the same account/username so it will be hard for you to track this or even CS won’t be able to track them.

8. This ranking loophole is so easy to abuse and on a scale which CS is not equipped to deal with and per their official response once this damage has been done to your gig they can’t fix it.

Official CS response:

“We need to make it clear here, that there is nothing we can do for your gig to change its position”

To put it simply, they can’t fix your gig’s position in the Fiverr’s SERP once you’ve been a victim of this illegal activity.

So as we can see that once the damage has been done it’s pretty much permanent and it won’t matter how hard you’ve worked towards your gig’s ranking or how good your service has been, once you’ve been a victim of this organized fraud you unfortunately won’t be able to fight back to save your years of hard work.

What can you do ?

If you’ve received multiple such ghost orders then don’t discard them thinking as coincidences as there are no series of coincidences and series of coincidences are called patterns. Note these patterns observe the timeline of such orders and your gig ranking before and after these ghost orders. Open a ticket with CS for such orders so that you can at the very least register your issue and you can also post here if you think you’ve been affected by this loophole in the Fiverr’s gig ranking system.

[cyaxrex]

This is interesting. I’ve also noticed that blocking buyers seems to send gigs into oblivion for a while.

[freddyfiver1]

this sounds plausible, and I applaud your detective work so far. However, the burden of proof is still on you to demonstrate that the fiverr ranking algorithm uses Order Cancellation as a heavily weighed criteria. In other words, if all it takes is 2-3 cancellations to completely invalidate 2 years of 5-star selling and 1,000’s of reviews, I would say the algorithm has serious flaws to begin with.

It would be similar to hiring a top scientist for 5 years, who is the best and is helping change the world, but because they clock in late to work 3 days in a row, they are terminated on the spot. Doesn’t make sense.

Just like Google, the secret sauce behind an algo should never be revealed and it should be robust enough to not easily be influenced by only one set of actions.

I’m not defending the algo, but we can’t jump to conclusions about it, either. The fact that ranking algos are shrouded in mystery relegates the entire conversation to mere conspiracy.

I agree with customer supports reply: no one should be able to simply message them and say, “hi, something fishy is going on with my account. Can you please bump up my ranking? thank you!” That is also a huge red flag in and of itself, if you put yourself in CS’ shoes.

I don’t believe my account was victimized by this, although I have sensed some funny business from time to time, it doesn’t lead to extreme scenarios (that I’m aware of).

Good work and hopefully fiverr looks into this.

[freddyfiver1]

This is interesting. I’ve also noticed that blocking buyers seems to send gigs into oblivion for a while.

oh, man. I hope this isn’t true. I don’t hesitate to block buyers who bother me, especially the penny pinchers. If you’re right, I just might have inadvertently demoted myself. I guess fiverr wants me to haggle whether I like it or not?

I get why, though. Fiverr doesn’t want buyers to have a bad experience. Getting blocked is pretty bad. I’ll keep this in mind. Thanks!

[thextremewp]

This is interesting. I’ve also noticed that blocking buyers seems to send gigs into oblivion for a while.

I wasn’t aware of this but I’m not surprised either 😒

[cyaxrex]

I wasn’t aware of this but I’m not surprised either 😒

I might be wrong. I’ve just noticed that I seem to get order and message slumps after blocking people. It could just be coincidence.

[misscrystal]

I might be wrong. I’ve just noticed that I seem to get order and message slumps after blocking people. It could just be coincidence.

I’ve just noticed that I seem to get order and message slumps after blocking people.

So THAT’S why people seem to want me to block them lately.

[thextremewp]

this sounds plausible, and I applaud your detective work so far. However, the burden of proof is still on you to demonstrate that the fiverr ranking algorithm uses Order Cancellation as a heavily weighed criteria. In other words, if all it takes is 2-3 cancellations to completely invalidate 2 years of 5-star selling and 1,000’s of reviews, I would say the algorithm has serious flaws to begin with.

It would be similar to hiring a top scientist for 5 years, who is the best and is helping change the world, but because they clock in late to work 3 days in a row, they are terminated on the spot. Doesn’t make sense.

Just like Google, the secret sauce behind an algo should never be revealed and it should be robust enough to not easily be influenced by only one set of actions.

I’m not defending the algo, but we can’t jump to conclusions about it, either. The fact that ranking algos are shrouded in mystery relegates the entire conversation to mere conspiracy.

I agree with customer supports reply: no one should be able to simply message them and say, “hi, something fishy is going on with my account. Can you please bump up my ranking? thank you!” That is also a huge red flag in and of itself, if you put yourself in CS’ shoes.

I don’t believe my account was victimized by this, although I have sensed some funny business from time to time, it doesn’t lead to extreme scenarios (that I’m aware of).

Good work and hopefully fiverr looks into this.

Exactly my point! this is baffling, and yes unfortunately the ranking do fluctuate that much. I’ve been documenting this and it isn’t going to be exact every time for everyone, however the results will be comparable to discard this is a one of instance. Also the process to use this loophole has to be followed exactly as I’ve listed, for example the order should be really late and cancelled. If you’re a top seller and get lots of orders like I do then you’ll be able to partially deal with this however it’s going to be a long cat and mouse game and in the end your stat’s won’t look good at all and the gig will crash.

Eventually the algo will flag your gig and will boot it much faster as the ghost orders adds up.

This will eventually make the top scientist look bad to algo after sometime 🤨

If this hasn’t happen to someone yet then the only way to prove this with 100% certainty is by breaking Fiverr’s TOS and exploiting the loophole, which I won’t recommend anyone to do.

Only Fiverr tech team can do this legally and they should create sandboxes and run some tests using the info I’ve supplied.

And yes I agree CS should not bump rankings but they should have tools to see if there is an actual abuse going on and when certain only then they should intervene to fix the damage. But the issue is that they don’t even have anything as of now to deal with this menace.

This is exactly something that happens to Google from time to time and the secret sauce does get cracked :thinking: . I vividly remember when something exactly like this happened with Google’s ranking and they had to ditch PR as that part of the algo was doing more harm then good.

[thextremewp]

I’ve just noticed that I seem to get order and message slumps after blocking people.

So THAT’S why people seem to want me to block them lately.

I’ve to block quite a healthy stream of people as I get tons of phishing scams in my inbox which the Fiverr spam filter keeps letting in. They keep getting better so I won’t blame the filter as long as blocking hackers and spammers don’t hurt me.

[parachaahmer2]

What I think that the simple solution for this issue can be:

• The clock should not start until the buyer has fulfilled the requirements (Clock will not start if the requirements form is empty). And if buyer gets late for fulfilling requirements, for example: 3 days has been passed and the buyer has still not filled the requirement form, the order will be automatically completed. Or if cancels automatically it should not affect seller’s stats.

• There should be some kind of option for seller to accept requirements maybe within at least 3 hours to make sure that if the requirements provided by the buyer is acceptable/understandable? And if seller reject requirements, the clock will not start. And if the seller does not respond within 3 hours the order will started with those provided requirements by the buyer. Which means that requirements can be wrong or right depending on the buyer/user.

[thextremewp]

What I think that the simple solution for this issue can be:

• The clock should not start until the buyer has fulfilled the requirements (Clock will not start if the requirements form is empty). And if buyer gets late for fulfilling requirements, for example: 3 days has been passed and the buyer has still not filled the requirement form, the order will be automatically completed. Or if cancels automatically it should not affect seller’s stats.

• There should be some kind of option for seller to accept requirements maybe within at least 3 hours to make sure that if the requirements provided by the buyer is acceptable/understandable? And if seller reject requirements, the clock will not start. And if the seller does not respond within 3 hours the order will started with those provided requirements by the buyer. Which means that requirements can be wrong or right depending on the buyer/user.

I second you! the system needs to have multiple robust fail safes to stop users gaming the system.

If possible the abuse should be stopped at the source as CS is not equipped to deal with such abuse and dealing with this is only going to add to their workload.

[eoinfinnegan]

Note: This is a critical Fiverr bug/loophole. Take action and save your gigs while you still can as nothing can be done to fix this or undo the damage done to your gigs once you get affected due to this.

I’ve discovered a serious loophole in Fiverr where any user can bring a gig down in ranking or completely render a gig useless to the point where no buyer will be able to find it. For example your highly successful gig which was ranking on the 1st page can be pushed down to Fiverr’s last SERPs. This loophole will affect any gig no matter if your gig has 1,000+ raving reviews, is years old with excellent stats or if it’s a relatively new gig.

With the growth of Fiverr marketplace unfortunately some users have resorted to this malice instead of playing fair. These users are deliberately hurting the gigs ranking of other sellers by exploiting this loophole in the Fiverr ranking algorithm and ruining years of hard work of other sellers by effectively pushing them at the bottom of Fiverr SERP.

I’ve spent months on investigating and documenting how this loophole is being abused and unfortunately due to lax or almost no hurdlers this will keep on getting worse. It’s disturbing to know that how they’re gaming the system and anyone’s gig ranking can be stolen like this while at the moment nothing is being done to stop this.

Here’s how this loophole works:

For the past few months I’ve had a couple of ghost orders, where buyers would place an order, start the order without providing the details and then would just disappear without filling any order requirements or they’ll keep on stalling you until the order is extremely late and then you’ll have to either cancel that order or keep waiting for their requirements or worse they’ll make you do some partial work and then disappear so that you won’t be able to cancel that order and they won’t agree to extend order timeline and they won’t cancel the order either until they get their desired results.

Among other goals , which I won’t be discussing in this topic as that merits its own thread their primary goal is to mess up your order stats so that your order’s ranking get affected.

How this loophole impact your Gigs:

Once you get a couple of such ghost orders your gig will get booted from the top Fiverr SERPs. For example if your gig was among the top 10 gigs on the first page of the Recommend page then after 3-5 such orders your gig will get booted to the 3rd or 4th page and the gig’s ranking will continue to decline as these ghost orders build up over time.

Why this loophole is really serious

Unfortunately the way Fiverr algorithm has been designed/re-designed made it really easy for users with malice intent to abuse this loophole in Fiverr ranking algorithm. As most users are aware that this is a real time algo so this abuse affects gigs in real time as there are no fail safes to deter system abuse. All the damage done to your gigs using this ranking loophole will be permanent and even customer support won’t be able to do anything to reverse any ranking damage done to your gigs that was done by exploiting this ranking loophole.

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

So while the impact of this abuse will be immediate for many gigs there isn’t any resolution available.

Is it even financially viable for users to exploit this loophole

Unfortunately it’s extremely viable and profitable as it seems that this is the reason that this gig ranking loophole is being abused in an organized fashion, users are exploiting this loophole for their gains without losing any money and in most cases they are gaining huge financial advantage illegally:

Here’s a complete breakdown of the process that they’re using and how they’re breaking Fiverr’s TOS and yet still staying completely undetected:

1. User with malice intent selects a gig that they want to down rank.

2. User Funds order using their PayPal or credit/debit card so once order gets cancelled Fiverr can refund them back to their payment provider including the service fee. Even in some cases if they don’t get their processing fee back they’ll still get the full order amount back and gig’s ranking still get’s damaged.

3. Users starts the order without filling in requirements and stall the seller until the order is extremely late and the user with the malice intent will then wait until the late red clock starts for you and as the order will now only keep getting late it will keep on down ranking a seller’s gig.

4. After damaging your ranking using the late order loophole they will either initiate the cancellation or wait for you to cancel the order.

5. Once the order gets cancelled the user has effectively completed this loophole cycle to damage your gig’s ranking and your profile stats.

6. Once the cancellation is complete the user gets to walk away without losing any funds at all and they can continue to repeat this process until they have damaged your best selling or a high ranking gig and then their gig or the competitor who has employed the services of such users gets their gig in place where your gig used to be. So this abuse might be used by your own competitors by creating a network of users to take this malice action on their behalf to make it difficult for Fiverr to track them back.

7. A same user won’t repeat this process with the same account/username so it will be hard for you to track this or even CS won’t be able to track them.

8. This ranking loophole is so easy to abuse and on a scale which CS is not equipped to deal with and per their official response once this damage has been done to your gig they can’t fix it.

Official CS response:

“We need to make it clear here, that there is nothing we can do for your gig to change its position”

To put it simply, they can’t fix your gig’s position in the Fiverr’s SERP once you’ve been a victim of this illegal activity.

So as we can see that once the damage has been done it’s pretty much permanent and it won’t matter how hard you’ve worked towards your gig’s ranking or how good your service has been, once you’ve been a victim of this organized fraud you unfortunately won’t be able to fight back to save your years of hard work.

What can you do ?

If you’ve received multiple such ghost orders then don’t discard them thinking as coincidences as there are no series of coincidences and series of coincidences are called patterns. Note these patterns observe the timeline of such orders and your gig ranking before and after these ghost orders. Open a ticket with CS for such orders so that you can at the very least register your issue and you can also post here if you think you’ve been affected by this loophole in the Fiverr’s gig ranking system.

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

Could you post SSs of these conversations if possible as what they say would be extremely interesting? Did they acknowledge that this is an issue, that the algorithm will negatively affect people in this situation? Did they suggest anything that might help?

[parachaahmer2]

I second you! the system needs to have multiple robust fail safes to stop users gaming the system.

If possible the abuse should be stopped at the source as CS is not equipped to deal with such abuse and dealing with this is only going to add to their workload.

It’s a question of marketplace integrity, whatever kind of workloads were before they were fixed and I believe that this issue will be fixed sooner or later. 🙂

[thextremewp]

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

Could you post SSs of these conversations if possible as what they say would be extremely interesting? Did they acknowledge that this is an issue, that the algorithm will negatively affect people in this situation? Did they suggest anything that might help?

It took months of some serious detective work 👀 to get them to acknowledge this but yes they have some what acknowledged this.

However they haven’t yet figured out a way to undo the damage done by this exploit. They are being quite mum about it which is understandable as they are not yet equipped to deal with this, which is also understandable as even I was baffled with this even after verifying my findings from multiple data points spread across multiple dates.

SS’s:

[thextremewp]

It’s a question of marketplace integrity, whatever kind of workloads were before they were fixed and I believe that this issue will be fixed sooner or later. 🙂

Indeed! the more this issue gets documented the easier it’ll be for them to fix.

[mariashtelle1]

Oh come on, don’t be a drama queen. With your opinion you uncovered the whole conspiracy with hundreds of buyers. In my opinion you just found an excuse for your gigs to be at the last page.

It’s not a secret that fiverr algorithm put sellers even the top rated sellers on the last page of search engine even without any cancellations or ghost orders.
This cancellations or late orders are the only two factors from many for a gig ranking which you need to maintain.
And that’s normal that if you can not maintain good stats algorithm will push your gigs lower because there are a lot of other sellers with better stats.

To be honest I have orders like this from time to time. I never let them run late, and I do have to cancel them before they can hurt my stats more.

But let’s dig dipper in your theory.
What you are saying means that buyer needs to create few accounts to place few orders to destroy your stats. However they can not create multiple accounts. As soon as they connect their payment method (because they still need to pay for your gig) their account will be banned because they can not connect the same payment methods or same email. I still can see them creating few different emails but they can not create multiple PayPal accounts. Therefore your theory will even fail on this stage.
Not even talking that fiverr accounts can have only certain amount of cancellations if they are legit and if they do a chargeback fiverr blocks their account right away.

P.S fiverr never admitted loophole or a conspiracy theory that you are talking about. All they said that they can not remove affect of those orders. And that’s true that all cancellations and late orders affect your statistics no matter what and no one can remove it.

[truedimagaming]

Oh come on, don’t be a drama queen. With your opinion you uncovered the whole conspiracy with hundreds of buyers. In my opinion you just found an excuse for your gigs to be at the last page.

It’s not a secret that fiverr algorithm put sellers even the top rated sellers on the last page of search engine even without any cancellations or ghost orders.

This cancellations or late orders are the only two factors from many for a gig ranking which you need to maintain.

And that’s normal that if you can not maintain good stats algorithm will push your gigs lower because there are a lot of other sellers with better stats.

To be honest I have orders like this from time to time. I never let them run late, and I do have to cancel them before they can hurt my stats more.

But let’s dig dipper in your theory.

What you are saying means that buyer needs to create few accounts to place few orders to destroy your stats. However they can not create multiple accounts. As soon as they connect their payment method (because they still need to pay for your gig) their account will be banned because they can not connect the same payment methods or same email. I still can see them creating few different emails but they can not create multiple PayPal accounts. Therefore your theory will even fail on this stage.

Not even talking that fiverr accounts can have only certain amount of cancellations if they are legit and if they do a chargeback fiverr blocks their account right away.

P.S fiverr never admitted loophole or a conspiracy theory that you are talking about. All they said that they can not remove affect of those orders. And that’s true that all cancellations and late orders affect your statistics no matter what and no one can remove it.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you can use different services to create a ‘virtual cards’ that is then connected to your main card, therefore giving you the ability to abuse this system and making you completely untraceable.

edit: grammer

[mariashtelle1]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you can use different services to create a ‘virtual cards’ that is then connected to your main card, therefore giving you the ability to abuse this system and making you completely untraceable.

edit: grammer

create a ‘virtual cards’ that is then connected to your main card

Not sure how that works but in European countries you can not create many virtual cards, even opening one bank account is pain in the ass and takes a lot of time.

So I don’t think that anyone will go through such a painful and time consuming process (which is also can be detected as a fraud in some countries by governments) just to hurt someone’s gig position. Too much of a conspiracy here.

[truedimagaming]

create a ‘virtual cards’ that is then connected to your main card

Not sure how that works but in European countries you can not create many virtual cards, even opening one bank account is pain in the ass and takes a lot of time.

So I don’t think that anyone will go through such a painful and time consuming process (which is also can be detected as a fraud in some countries by governments) just to hurt someone’s gig position. Too much of a conspiracy here.

some of these services are actually very easy to use (in the US specifically). You connect your bank account and create as many cards, everything just like a normal bank account just with as many cards as you want.

[truedimagaming]

some of these services are actually very easy to use (in the US specifically). You connect your bank account and create as many cards, everything just like a normal bank account just with as many cards as you want.

going even deeper, this actually become a HUGE issue because the use of VPNs and these virtual cards makes you completely untraceable. You can literally ruin years of work for many people in a very small amount of time.

This all goes to show how Fiverr doesn’t have enough protection for it’s sellers.

Hundreds of threads are created on how people stopped receiving orders almost completely, and almost all threads are on how fiverr doesn’t have enough protection for it’s sellers.

All of this is kinda disappointing

Sorry for all the edits this topic just really triggers me.

[hanshuber16]

Note: This is a critical Fiverr bug/loophole. Take action and save your gigs while you still can as nothing can be done to fix this or undo the damage done to your gigs once you get affected due to this.

I’ve discovered a serious loophole in Fiverr where any user can bring a gig down in ranking or completely render a gig useless to the point where no buyer will be able to find it. For example your highly successful gig which was ranking on the 1st page can be pushed down to Fiverr’s last SERPs. This loophole will affect any gig no matter if your gig has 1,000+ raving reviews, is years old with excellent stats or if it’s a relatively new gig.

With the growth of Fiverr marketplace unfortunately some users have resorted to this malice instead of playing fair. These users are deliberately hurting the gigs ranking of other sellers by exploiting this loophole in the Fiverr ranking algorithm and ruining years of hard work of other sellers by effectively pushing them at the bottom of Fiverr SERP.

I’ve spent months on investigating and documenting how this loophole is being abused and unfortunately due to lax or almost no hurdlers this will keep on getting worse. It’s disturbing to know that how they’re gaming the system and anyone’s gig ranking can be stolen like this while at the moment nothing is being done to stop this.

Here’s how this loophole works:

For the past few months I’ve had a couple of ghost orders, where buyers would place an order, start the order without providing the details and then would just disappear without filling any order requirements or they’ll keep on stalling you until the order is extremely late and then you’ll have to either cancel that order or keep waiting for their requirements or worse they’ll make you do some partial work and then disappear so that you won’t be able to cancel that order and they won’t agree to extend order timeline and they won’t cancel the order either until they get their desired results.

Among other goals , which I won’t be discussing in this topic as that merits its own thread their primary goal is to mess up your order stats so that your order’s ranking get affected.

How this loophole impact your Gigs:

Once you get a couple of such ghost orders your gig will get booted from the top Fiverr SERPs. For example if your gig was among the top 10 gigs on the first page of the Recommend page then after 3-5 such orders your gig will get booted to the 3rd or 4th page and the gig’s ranking will continue to decline as these ghost orders build up over time.

Why this loophole is really serious

Unfortunately the way Fiverr algorithm has been designed/re-designed made it really easy for users with malice intent to abuse this loophole in Fiverr ranking algorithm. As most users are aware that this is a real time algo so this abuse affects gigs in real time as there are no fail safes to deter system abuse. All the damage done to your gigs using this ranking loophole will be permanent and even customer support won’t be able to do anything to reverse any ranking damage done to your gigs that was done by exploiting this ranking loophole.

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

So while the impact of this abuse will be immediate for many gigs there isn’t any resolution available.

Is it even financially viable for users to exploit this loophole

Unfortunately it’s extremely viable and profitable as it seems that this is the reason that this gig ranking loophole is being abused in an organized fashion, users are exploiting this loophole for their gains without losing any money and in most cases they are gaining huge financial advantage illegally:

Here’s a complete breakdown of the process that they’re using and how they’re breaking Fiverr’s TOS and yet still staying completely undetected:

1. User with malice intent selects a gig that they want to down rank.

2. User Funds order using their PayPal or credit/debit card so once order gets cancelled Fiverr can refund them back to their payment provider including the service fee. Even in some cases if they don’t get their processing fee back they’ll still get the full order amount back and gig’s ranking still get’s damaged.

3. Users starts the order without filling in requirements and stall the seller until the order is extremely late and the user with the malice intent will then wait until the late red clock starts for you and as the order will now only keep getting late it will keep on down ranking a seller’s gig.

4. After damaging your ranking using the late order loophole they will either initiate the cancellation or wait for you to cancel the order.

5. Once the order gets cancelled the user has effectively completed this loophole cycle to damage your gig’s ranking and your profile stats.

6. Once the cancellation is complete the user gets to walk away without losing any funds at all and they can continue to repeat this process until they have damaged your best selling or a high ranking gig and then their gig or the competitor who has employed the services of such users gets their gig in place where your gig used to be. So this abuse might be used by your own competitors by creating a network of users to take this malice action on their behalf to make it difficult for Fiverr to track them back.

7. A same user won’t repeat this process with the same account/username so it will be hard for you to track this or even CS won’t be able to track them.

8. This ranking loophole is so easy to abuse and on a scale which CS is not equipped to deal with and per their official response once this damage has been done to your gig they can’t fix it.

Official CS response:

“We need to make it clear here, that there is nothing we can do for your gig to change its position”

To put it simply, they can’t fix your gig’s position in the Fiverr’s SERP once you’ve been a victim of this illegal activity.

So as we can see that once the damage has been done it’s pretty much permanent and it won’t matter how hard you’ve worked towards your gig’s ranking or how good your service has been, once you’ve been a victim of this organized fraud you unfortunately won’t be able to fight back to save your years of hard work.

What can you do ?

If you’ve received multiple such ghost orders then don’t discard them thinking as coincidences as there are no series of coincidences and series of coincidences are called patterns. Note these patterns observe the timeline of such orders and your gig ranking before and after these ghost orders. Open a ticket with CS for such orders so that you can at the very least register your issue and you can also post here if you think you’ve been affected by this loophole in the Fiverr’s gig ranking system.

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

Unfortunately, the screen shots of your interactions with CS don’t really show them acknowledging this “system abuse.”

In fact, the screen shots only show CS reps. using one of their extremely vague template responses.

[truedimagaming]

My understanding after discussing this multiple times with senior support reps is that they were not expecting to see system abuse on this scale and as of now they don’t have a system in place to fight back this abuse or undo any damage that is being done this way.

Unfortunately, the screen shots of your interactions with CS don’t really show them acknowledging this “system abuse.”

In fact, the screen shots only show CS reps. using one of their extremely vague template responses.

I’ll just get my opinion out there, the chance of Fiverr even acknowledging it and DOING something about it is very low.

edit: sorry if I’m being a little rude, as I said before, this topic trigger me quite alot

[cyaxrex]

Oh come on, don’t be a drama queen. With your opinion you uncovered the whole conspiracy with hundreds of buyers. In my opinion you just found an excuse for your gigs to be at the last page.

It’s not a secret that fiverr algorithm put sellers even the top rated sellers on the last page of search engine even without any cancellations or ghost orders.

This cancellations or late orders are the only two factors from many for a gig ranking which you need to maintain.

And that’s normal that if you can not maintain good stats algorithm will push your gigs lower because there are a lot of other sellers with better stats.

To be honest I have orders like this from time to time. I never let them run late, and I do have to cancel them before they can hurt my stats more.

But let’s dig dipper in your theory.

What you are saying means that buyer needs to create few accounts to place few orders to destroy your stats. However they can not create multiple accounts. As soon as they connect their payment method (because they still need to pay for your gig) their account will be banned because they can not connect the same payment methods or same email. I still can see them creating few different emails but they can not create multiple PayPal accounts. Therefore your theory will even fail on this stage.

Not even talking that fiverr accounts can have only certain amount of cancellations if they are legit and if they do a chargeback fiverr blocks their account right away.

P.S fiverr never admitted loophole or a conspiracy theory that you are talking about. All they said that they can not remove affect of those orders. And that’s true that all cancellations and late orders affect your statistics no matter what and no one can remove it.

What you are saying means that buyer needs to create few accounts to place few orders to destroy your stats. However they can not create multiple accounts. As soon as they connect their payment method (because they still need to pay for your gig) their account will be banned because they can not connect the same payment methods or same email.

This isn’t strictly true. I have about twenty non-stated orders. Most of my non-started writing orders are from other sellers selling similar services. Payment methods can also be added several times to different Fiverr accounts. This is why the majority of scammer buyers are always new to Fiverr. They have closed (or had closed) their last account, and simply rinse and repeat the same tactics.

Fiverr may not be allowed to do anything about this, as they can’t legally keep payment details on record for people who no longer use the site.

To be honest I have orders like this from time to time. I never let them run late, and I do have to cancel them before they can hurt my stats more.

Well, you must have an incredible sales volume to make up for the rating impact.

[hanshuber16]

It took months of some serious detective work 👀 to get them to acknowledge this but yes they have some what acknowledged this.

However they haven’t yet figured out a way to undo the damage done by this exploit. They are being quite mum about it which is understandable as they are not yet equipped to deal with this, which is also understandable as even I was baffled with this even after verifying my findings from multiple data points spread across multiple dates.

SS’s:

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This is not about agreeing/disagreeing with what you have said.

You previously stated that Fiverr had acknowledged this issue when in fact they never did!

It took months of some serious detective work 👀 to get them to acknowledge this

It looks like they never acknowledged ANYTHING. They were just your run-of-the-mill template responses that CS reps. always use.

[truedimagaming]

What you are saying means that buyer needs to create few accounts to place few orders to destroy your stats. However they can not create multiple accounts. As soon as they connect their payment method (because they still need to pay for your gig) their account will be banned because they can not connect the same payment methods or same email.

This isn’t strictly true. I have about twenty non-stated orders. Most of my non-started writing orders are from other sellers selling similar services. Payment methods can also be added several times to different Fiverr accounts. This is why the majority of scammer buyers are always new to Fiverr. They have closed (or had closed) their last account, and simply rinse and repeat the same tactics.

Fiverr may not be allowed to do anything about this, as they can’t legally keep payment details on record for people who no longer use the site.

To be honest I have orders like this from time to time. I never let them run late, and I do have to cancel them before they can hurt my stats more.

Well, you must have an incredible sales volume to make up for the rating impact.

I think the only way to solve this issue would be changing the algorithm significantly to give protections and support to sellers.