Helping a customer who is a victim of a phishing incident with payments facilitated via Fiverr

[josh_rodd]

Hello,

I am helping a client who has been the victim of a phishing incident impersonating Shopify with the usual techniques (claiming their site has malware, that they will be shut down soon, etc.) and eventually the client was pressured into giving access to their Shopify account and facilitating payments to the scammer via Fiverr.

They facilitated two payments before reaching out to us.

I would like to know the best course of action to help my customer. Once they granted access to the Shopify account, the scammer scrambled their site and made it worse and then demanded more payments via Fiverr.

I have not used Fiverr but I hope that phishing attempts and threatening customers is against Fiverr's terms of use. Is there any hope to get my client a refund? She paid Fiverr via PayPal.

Thanks for any help. (For the record, I am not an active buyer or seller on Fiverr, but am simply posting here to reach out to the rest of the community.) I already e-mail support@fiverr.com with all relevant information and they e-mailed me back a ticket number.

Edit: Most of the communication occurred via Gmail outside of the usual Fiverr communication channels. I don't know how relevant that is. My understanding is that Fiverr expects almost all communication to be performed inside of Fiverr.

Josh Rodd
Sandy Creek Technologies LLC

Edited November 5 by josh_rodd

[priyank_mod]

1. If they placed order with a seller on Fiverr and seller cheated by gaining access to the account and demanding more money. They should report the seller with reports (which you have already done). Fiverr will take action against the seller and most probably refund the order amount too, which was "officially" paid to Fiverr while placing the order. 

2. For the communication and payments which happened outside the platform, Fiverr might not be able to help. 

I'm tagging Fiverr staff here @ana_tomy. She will be able to guide you better. You can share your support ticket number with her. 

[josh_rodd]

Thanks for your fast reply, priyank_mod!

All the payments were facilitated via Fiverr. I checked her Shopify account with her and confirmed nothing happened on the financial side, thank goodness.

 

[ana_tomy]

Thanks for tagging me and bringing this to my attention @priyank_mod 

Hi @josh_rodd, sorry to read your client experienced this while on our platform, and thanks for contacting the Customer Support team right away. The team will investigate the issue and get back to you after a thorough review is done. Any additional information you may have will be very helpful, including the conversation outside Fiverr (showing the email address/time stamp and any other information). The team will take action against the seller for any violation of our ToS. Thanks again for contacting us here about this, sadly here on the Forum we don't replace the CS team, so this can be resolved only through contacting them, which means you're on the right path to having this sorted out. Good luck 🍀

 

[josh_rodd]

Thanks for the reply, ana_tomy! Could you tell me how to initiate the Customer Support process? The work items are listed as "Completed", and the Resolution Center says to send a message to your Freelancer. However, that Freelancer (the scammer)'s account seems to be deactivated as we can't send any messages to it. I directed her to just send an email to support@fiverr.com

Apologies for my ignorance on this... I've never used Fiverr, despite being a freelancer myself.