Fake seller accounts everywhere

[floridaclay]

I'm shocked at all of the fake seller accounts on Fiverr. What is Fiverr doing to protect buyers? The accounts use common American names, fake images they swipe off of Google (according to Google Lens), and they claim to be in the United States, but when you communicate with the seller, they're obviously not in the US.  Why doesn't Fiverr allow for the reporting of fake accounts within the listing instead of requiring the user to go through customer service? Very disappointing and potentially liable. 

Edited Thursday at 09:05 AM by floridaclay

[atulcodex]

5 hours ago, floridaclay said:

I'm shocked at all of the fake seller accounts on Fiverr. What is Fiverr doing to protect buyers? The accounts use common American names, fake images they swipe off of Google (according to Google Lens), and they claim to be in the United States, but when you communicate with the seller, they're obviously not in the US.  Why doesn't Fiverr allow for the reporting of fake accounts within the listing instead of requiring the user to go through customer service? Very disappointing and potentially liable. 

You can share those accounts link to Fiverr team directly, they will take actions

[floridaclay]

5 hours ago, atulcodex said:

You can share those accounts link to Fiverr team directly, they will take actions

Fiverr isn't going to do anything. All Fiverr has to do is perform a search for "stamped plans" and other than maybe solar, every single one of the accounts are fake.  

[donnovan86]

38 minutes ago, floridaclay said:

Fiverr isn't going to do anything.

They do. They ban reported sellers that are not ok. There are millions of accounts and gigs. Obviously their team is too small to manually go through everything. But if stuff is reported or the AI finds that stuff is not ok, they are taking action. 

[uk1000]

27 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

They ban reported sellers that are not ok. There are millions of accounts and gigs.

There's not millions of sellers on Fiverr though. Though there are millions of buyers.

According to Fiverr's Q4 2022 prepared remarks (https://investors.fiverr.com/fourth-quarter-2022 )

Quote

hundreds of thousands of freelancers...With hundreds of thousands of sellers and millions of service listings, we must deliver world-class search and discovery

So it's probably less than 1 million sellers still or at least <2 million.

12 hours ago, floridaclay said:

Why doesn't Fiverr allow for the reporting of fake accounts within the listing instead of requiring the user to go through customer service?

If you go to the gig page, when you're logged into Fiverr, there's 3 dots on the top right of the gig. Pressing those 3 dots shows the option "Report this gig" so you could report the gig there even if there's not a "report account" option on the profile.

Edited Thursday at 09:14 PM by uk1000

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, uk1000 said:

There's not millions of sellers on Fiverr though. Though there are millions of buyers.

 

Active, no. Existing seller accounts, most likely. 

[uk1000]

15 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Active, no. Existing seller accounts, most likely. 

Though if we look at their SEC filing (from 2019 so about 5 years out of date), where their definition of "active" sellers was:

Quote

"Active sellers" as of any given date means sellers who have sold a Gig on Fiverr within the last 12-month period.

So not quite the same definition as a seller who just has an active account and at least 1 active gig, so anyway, they say in that:

Quote

Our approach fundamentally transforms the traditional freelancer staffing model into an e-commerce-like experience. Since inception, we have facilitated over 50 million transactions between over 5.5 million buyers and more than 830,000 sellers on our platform.

Quote

Our sellers

In the twelve months ended March 31, 2019, our platform empowered approximately 255,000 active sellers from over 160 countries across the globe.

https://investors.fiverr.com/node/6476/html

so based on that, from 2010 to 2019 only around (or a bit more than) 830,000 sellers sold something.

Edited Thursday at 10:41 PM by uk1000

[donnovan86]

15 minutes ago, uk1000 said:

830,000 sellers sold something.

You're using pre-pandemic data though, and during the pandemic they had quite a lot of growth, although it was unsustainable. Regardless, there are lots of sellers, that was the idea. We don't need to go back and forth with numbers because only Fiverr knows. And they will only list active sellers anyway, people with an active gig. 

Edited Thursday at 10:53 PM by donnovan86

[uk1000]

8 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

You're using pre-pandemic data though

I said what they said in the post-pandemic time though above that, in their Q4 2022 prepared remarks where they said

"hundreds of thousands of freelancers...With hundreds of thousands of sellers and millions of service listings, we must deliver world-class search and discovery ".

So still not millions of freelancers.

8 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

because only Fiverr knows

The search engines will know - by looking at robots.txt and sitemap files probably (eg. active sellers with an active gig).

[mahi1nsarkar]

I am really shocked that this platform have lot of fake buyers and seller