martinacaraffa

Hi! I'm a new freelancer. I've been taking Fiverr seriously for like a month, and I received my first bigger order, yay! I'll go straight to the point: Is it possible as a Fiverr seller to get scammed by a buyer? The client in question ordered 8 hours of work for $80 from my virtual assistance gig, as he needs me to manually copy into an Excel sheet a few thousand lines of data. He seems like a great guy, we had great communication and everything went really well so far, I even sent him a screenshot of the first few lines of the document to know if he liked the structure I had used and if I could keep going like that, and he said he loved it! I have not seen any red flags. However, as I am already like 4 hours into the project and I am pouring my heart and soul into it to make sure he is happy with the results, I am starting to get some intrusive throughts in the back of my head saying like "what if once you're done and deliver the document he cancels the order and runs away with your work for free?". He really seems like a genuinely nice person that would not just steal my work and run, however my anxiety is telling me that it could maybe potentially be an option, as I have read on Quora and Reddit of sellers who have had this experience. Do you have any advice? I really don't think it will be the case for me for this specific order, but did you guys have any bad experience where the client did not pay and ran with your work? Any tips on red flags to potentially look out for in general when talking to clients and taking orders? This will be helpful in general, as I might run into this stuff in the future (I think everyone does at least once in their lifetime). I already know about scammers that try to lure you off the platform or that try to have you literally pay, but have you ever been scammed like on the platform and with the client placing a legit order?

Thanks to everyone who replied! All the advice you gave me was very helpful, it helped me feel better about the situation and, most importantly, it will help me improve as a freelancer. @imagination7413 Thanks a lot for the links, I will read through all of them! @sunboatrecords I was actually planning on recording videos for both my profile and my gigs, so that I can briefly explain who I am, what services I offer, and people can actually see the person they would be potentially working with!

Hey! I'm new and I just got my first experience with a rude customer 😞 I was wondering if any of the more experienced freelancers could give me any tips. This person contacted me about my virtual assistance gig, saying that he needed someone that could work for him longterm, 2-4 hours per day, 5 days a week, €30 per day. I'm not even sure if this is even possible or compliant to the guidelines, as from what I know there are no hourly/longterm options on Fiverr (?). Anyway, he says that he needs help with general tasks related to his business, like editing landing pages, writing the content with chatGPT, editing it, writing fake reviews or doing Canva designs. So basically we decide on doing a test run first, two hours of work done today for free (which already sounds bad enough T - T, but I'm a newbie and I am naive), which I agree on doing since this could turn into a more longterm opportunity. At this point he sends me invites to join his team on all his softwares, including Asana, which he says will be used to give instructions and direct the workflow. I log in, follow what he wrote, which literally said "Edit landing page through Elementor. Change product price to €59", and then proceeded to give more instructions on some Canva designs he needed. So I do what he says and text him, and oh boy. He. Is. PISSED. He tells me he is shook that I only changed the price in the landing page. What about the rest? What about images and tags and reviews and descriptions? He calls me an incompetent and says he cannot believe I SERIOUSLY thought he would pay me just to change a single product price. So I try to keep calm and not freak out, and politely tell him that I simply did what the Asana instructions said, and that had they said anything about other areas of the landing page to edit, I would have done that too. He is pissed again. He tells me again he cannot believe how incompetent I really am, that we've been talking about titles and tags and descriptions and reviews for like an hour now and that I should have done that. Not true. He just briefly mentioned them when he first contacted me in a not-so-clear list of what would be rough examples of my daily activities. No instructions. No directions. What was I even supposed to edit? How did he want it to be edited? What style did he want? Which elements did he want me to edit/makeover and which ones did he want me to keep? I keep politely insisting that I simply followed the instructions on Asana like he said I should, and that I literally would have had NO ISSUE working on them IF ONLY THEY WERE IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. He insists I'm incompetent, revokes all access to the softwares and disappears. What was I supposed to do? 😥This is messed up on many levels, now that I'm thinking about it again. From the fact that I agreed to do two hours of work for free (I was naive), to how he flipped out immediately and kept insulting me and calling me incompetent, to how he thought I was supposed to edit his ENTIRE landing page with no clear instructions or directions, and just because he had briefly mentioned it once at the very beginning of our conversations, before we even agreed to try out. Luckily there was no official order placed so I don't even think he can leave me a bad review (?), and I don' think my stats will be affected (?). What do you guys think about this? Any tips? I'm really new to this, as (despite having had my profile for years) I only started taking it seriously last month. This episode really made me feel bad, as I'm not used to such behaviours and such poor communication.