Fiverr's Treatment of Loyal Sellers is Appalling! My 14-Year Journey Ends Here.

[hintgiver]

First, I want to say that I have been a supporter of this platform since since 2010 - 14 years! I was one of the early adopters here and used to be a top rated seller as well. I have always liked and recommended Fiverr / referred clients to sellers on Fiverr that I liked. Now, yesterday, I see a message in my account saying:

"Your account has been flagged for a severe violation of Fiverr policies. As a result, you are not able to participate in the level system."

My first thought was, oh, okay, that must be some false alarm. I write to the customer support to ask what is going on and how this can be resolved.

I receive a - most likely bot - answer stating:

"After careful review, your account has been flagged due to activities indicating a connection to violations of our Terms of Service or location inconsistencies. Consequently, your participation in Fiverr's level system is permanently restricted. Please be advised that this was reviewed multiple times and the decision is final."

I sometimes need to use a VPN for my work to check clients ads and competitors in their country, also, I travel from time to time. So even if this does hurt the TOS this shouldn't be the case since you can verify the location and the account owner in some other way easily. This is absolutely unacceptable and - sorry - stupid. It basically means that only people who are never leaving their house with a static IP can work on Fiverr - everyone else might be doomed to get their account flagged eventually. 

Nobody else in my household has Fiverr (and even this is a bizarre rule, as there should be no limitation either).

I have done nothing wrong and all I've done was made this platform money.

But I guess that's it then. I will actively tell all of my clients and future clients to never ever use Fiverr again. I am very disappointed on how sellers are treated that were around during your start up phase and helped you grow into what you are today and then are simply discarded because of some "location inconsistencies". 

Take care,
hintgiver
 

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, hintgiver said:

I sometimes need to use a VPN

I saw other people saying they use VPN for work.. You can easily have a separate browser where you use the VPN, most VPN services have a browser extension. So you don't even have to open the browser where you have Fiverr's pages... You just have another browser with the VPN active.. 

 

1 hour ago, hintgiver said:

But I guess that's it then. I will actively tell all of my clients and future clients to never ever use Fiverr again. I am very disappointed on how sellers are treated that were around during your start up phase and helped you grow into what you are today and then are simply discarded because of some "location inconsistencies". 

 

It doesn't matter how much you earned on Fiverr, if there's any issue like this, they close the account right away. I am pretty sure there were lots of SEO sellers with a very questionable service that ended up being banned, and they had 50K+ reviews..

[hintgiver]

Yeah, god forbid, you forget that you have the VPN accidentally still switched on - I guess we are all machines and never forget to use different browsers or whatnot. While there might be sketchy sellers, I would expect from Fiverr a bit more than just an AI tool answering my message and also to have a proper look at each account. I am sure its quite easy to find out who has questionable services and who doesn't. In the very least, I would expect to have an actual human being answering my customer support inquiry. 

[rawque_gulia]

VPN is not even against Fiverr's terms at all. It's nowhere written that using a VPN is a violation. Even customer support "only recommends" not to use a VPN. However, there's a difference between "recommended to not use" and "not allowed to use."

So, banning based on using VPNs (if the tabs were open in the background) doesn't make any sense.

If the user is accessing Fiverr using a VPN to fake their location, that's a different story, and I never support this behavior and understand that it's against the terms. But here, I am only referring to situations where a person is using a VPN, and the tabs are open in the background.

The main issue seems to be that customer support is very confident in the decisions made by their AI algorithm, which can be false on many occasions.

[priyank_mod]

Loyalty is a subjective term. Employees are loyal to companies and are often rewarded in return (and occasionally get mistreated/fired too).

But in open market - no such term or relationship exists. People move on to what's more beneficial for them. 

Our relationship with Fiverr is governed by Fiverr's rules and it only works - until it is compliant and mutually beneficial. And since we work on their platform - they can change, modify or introduce new rules at any point of time. 

[mateusbl]

Probably this may be some AI or automatic robot applying wrong warnings, what happened with the Fiverr Freedom Marketing? This no longer exist? @Kesha

Anywhere Workers

 

 

Edited June 10 by mateusbl

[donnovan86]

2 hours ago, hintgiver said:

I guess we are all machines and never forget to use different browsers or whatnot.

I think the main problem here is that a lot of people on Fiverr lie about their location, for their benefit of course. I think even Kesha mentioned that they take location inconsistencies very seriously.

2 hours ago, rawque_gulia said:

So, banning based on using VPNs (if the tabs were open in the background) doesn't make any sense.

 

I don't know the exact situation of the OP. But if an account randomly appears to be in France now, the US after 10 minutes and Vietnam half an hour after that, clearly either the account was hacked or the account owner uses some shenanigans. So I can see that standing out and Fiverr taking action automatically. 

2 hours ago, rawque_gulia said:

The main issue seems to be that customer support is very confident in the decisions made by their AI algorithm, which can be false on many occasions.

That's because support is not taking the decisions themselves. Based on what a few topics similar to this mentioned, CS specifically says that the department handling these issues already checked, and the decision is final. So, if we are to trust them, AI identifies the problem and a team double-checks. I had an issue where I had a warning due to AI randomly doing stuff, but they manually checked without me saying anything and it was removed. So make of that as you will, it was not a ban or anything like that. 

Edited June 10 by donnovan86

[oji2600]

I really want to know why fiver with this new system is becoming more difficult for sellers. I have sold a lot with fiver. and on average my buyers are satisfied. Indeed, I gave an extension of time, but I have discussed it with the client and Klent Stuju, there is no problem. but why does the fifer system now assume that it happens with clients and makes my score low, this is not fair. and what about fifer itself with the current system, are you okay? In fact, it seems that Fifer prioritizes new members over old members, even though the new members are inexperienced. and when you can only complete a few orders, fiver has already raised it to an earlier page. whereas I have more than 500 reviews and more than 900 orders with clients who can only be counted on the fingers of the hand who gave a score of 4. and that has been removed from the page. is that fair. come on five dollars. help us, we only do work on fiver, even I do fiver work until I refuse other work. Even when I got married because Fiver chats had to be replied to, I still replied to chats from Fiver. Yes, there are holidays, but when I choose holidays, my performance statistics decrease

[Kesha]

Hi there @hintgiver, 

Sorry to hear of this incident. We have raised this issue to the appropriate parties and you should've received an email from our CS department. Please follow the steps outlined in the email to work on getting this issue resolved. 

Thanks!