Buyer trying to scam me

[patcanno]

I have a buyer trying to weasel out of paying for a job. I delivered the job, he told me he loved the direction it was heading in, then promptly requested to cancel the order as he'd rewritten it all himself. He's now refusing to pay and Fiverr support have been utterly useless. Does anyone have any suggestions? 

 

[addytor]

It's just bad luck man. If you wanna get paid, you'll get paid, that is why you pay 20% commission to Fiverr, but that'll also give the buyer the opportunity to hammer you down with a 1 star rating.

Depends on your profile, if your getting decent amount of orders, then take the 1 star, but if you're starting out, I'd suggest to just cancel it.

Like I said it's an unfortunate incident. 

[jacy_wilkie20]

I also had a frustrating experience with a scammer, they created an order without messaging me and said if I clicked a link and did some kind of test for them they'd leave me a good review. And this was an illustration gig. I told them no, this is a scam, and made them cancel the order. But then my dashboard says 50 percent order completion and I lost $4 which makes me look bad for something that was not even my fault. I tried to get help but Fiverr did nothing. So annoying. 

 

[lynddg]

I too am currently suffering at the whims of a scammer.  I should have known.  The initial contact was to try and get me to heavily discount my charges.  We had some conversation back and forth. He started on about hourly rates and not wanting to pay more than so much per hour in GDP.  When I pointed out that the dollar price quoted did not equate to as much as the GDP rate he was suggesting, he then came back and asked me to send an offer at full rate.

I have excellent feedback and many satisfied customers, many who are repeat buyers.  My work is always  of the highest quality.

He 

Requested a revision - but most of what he wanted changed was not what was requested in the original brief.  He'd ran my work through all sorts of software and pulled it to pieces.  Yet the software was not applicable to the style of work requested.  It was a web page comprising of several short pieces.  I am good at utilizing SEO and he actually asked me to correct one of the long tail keywords that he'd requested - then it wouldn't be the requested keywords!

He also used Grammarly to check the writing and some of the suggestions were incorrect English.  I worked in education for years, including teaching A level English and marking exams.  So I do understand the English language and have very high standards.

As an act of goodwill, I made the changes requested to change the work style and submitted the work.  This too was not good enough, despite for the second time sending exactly what was requested.  The only differences being not changing requests that would have been very poor English and not changing the long tailed keyword.  BUT with a message that I was happy to offer a second free revision to do so if he was certain he wanted those changes.

The second delivery was also rejected for a bunch of other weird reasons.  I then offered to make further changes for a fee (I offer one revision).  Which was eventually rejected.

I had a colleague he had a saying by her desk "Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it".  That is the position I am in with this buyer.  They are enjoying messing me about and have no intention of paying for the work.

I should have stepped away from the job as soon as I realized that it is an immoral business.  But by the time I realized, when I looked at the job to get started I'd had the job for 5 days in a queue and I believed it wouldn't have been fair to pull out.

 

[miiila]

Hello @lynddg. Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. At least, your gut feeling telling you to step away sooner or not get into anything right away, will improve over time, weak consolation as it may be. Just wanted to let you know that according to forum rules, it's not allowed to call out users negatively, while posting their usernames (or screenshots showing usernames or other identifiable information), it will get your post hidden or edited when a forum shepherd notices or is made aware. As long as your post is still new, you may be able to edit it yourself; after some time, no idea when exactly, we can't edit our own posts any longer.