Wednesday 16 July 2014

Daylight robbery on dead accounts

Lets start with one of those nasty little things from the freelancer.com terms and conditions! It too explains, why the site is having so much "active" users, although their reputation can hardly get worse than it is.
If you are ever so pissed you just want to leave you will soon notice, that there is no option to delete your account. So, as usual when you don't want to use a site anymore, you will just not longer log-in to it. But be careful! At this point, freelancer.com has another filthy little trick to still take your money:

If you are not logged-in for six month, freelancer.com will take a fee of up to 10€ (about 13$, exchangerate calculated myself) per month(!) from your connected payment method until the account is reactivated or canceled.

Is this even legal?

This brings me to the following Questions:
  1. The stated "services" freelancer.com is taking that fee for are wether not used (the HireMe-Service for an inactive account?!?) or not worth a fraction of this amount (storage? traffic? for 10€ per month? wtf?). Especially compared to the fact, that there are membershipplans for 0€, 0.99€, 3.95€ and 7.95€ this is a absurd high fee! Ist there no usury law in australia?
  2. Where I come from there is a simple rule: making use of your right to cancel is not allowed to be any more complicate than the contracting (for example: if you make a contract per mail, you can cancel the contract per mail, they are not allowed to claim a handwritten, parfumed letter). This site offers me a registration in a few clicks, but nowhere it is offering a click to cancel. Blame yourself, freelancer.com! If you don't give me an appropriate way to cancel, then it's not my fault, when you need to spend such an high amount (I have to giggle)for the "services" to dead accounts. Talking to the morons from the so called "support" is by the way no appropriate option, it's more like a kind of torture.
  3. This is a bit pointless to say, because that would be a customer friendly service and we all know freelancer.com treats customers like shit, but: a reliable company would send a mail, before they charge a fee from your account in silent, that is obviously a mistake. But well, this shady company freelancer.com constructed their terms to produce a lot of those "mistakes", so of course they will notice you about that.

How to get rid of the scammers

So, what should you do when you decide to leave the tricksters alone?
  • To make sure they can't charge any further fees from you, block them from your account! Who knows, what comes else, there are other cases in wich they will charge you later, too. Revoke the direct debit mandat to your bank, go to the paypal site and block freelancer.com (Profile / My PreApproved Payments / select name of the merchant / view agreement / cancel / following the steps after that).
  • Compared to the other option, it spares life-time and nerves just to log-in every 5 month for the rest of your life, but if you have balls of steel and plenty of time you can try to contact the "support" to cancel your account, but embrace yourself to get stuck in an endless loop.
The informations about the terms and services of freelancer.com and their fees are taken from their site on the 16.07.2014. If you are in need, please take a look by yourself to ensure the informations are right and up-to-date under:
freelancer.com/feesandcharges
freelancer.com/page.php?p=info/terms
By scratching your head at least once while you read this post, you agreed to convey me your firstborn-child.

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