Freelancer.com Sucks, Do Not Use Their Service!

In this review we shall explore freelancer.com. The idea behind this website is very clever. It could have become a very valuable service to society; however due to the sheer greediness of its owners, the company has become a nightmare, and a source of grievance to many people. 

As you probably already know, freelancer.com is a website that lets employers and employees meet each other in order to realize a project. Basically, a platform that allows people to meet in order to give work or get work.

A couple of days ago business insider published an article mentioning the fact that freelancer.com had purchased escrow.com for $US 7.5 million. Also, it was mentioned that over past year freelancer was essentially in a buying spree, in order to "build out" its community. In other words, they are buying out the competition in an attempt to consolidate a substantial share of the freelancing market online. This is fine for me, provided they supply a valuable service for its users, which they don't. 

The first fatal flaw of freelancer.com is its system of charging a percentage fee for each project completed, as well as, all the other fees, deposits, and subscriptions that go along with making an account. Though, they do give you a free trial, it is hardly any help for people seeking employment or looking for employees. First of all, freelancer.com could obtain their revenue through different sources, while providing a platform free of charge. One way I could think of is through advertisement. However, I am not here to give them any ideas, I am here to simply point out the immorality of people taking advantage of others whom are seeking work.  

Let us look at some of the evidence; this review can be found as the top hit when searching for the words "freelancer.com review". This testimony came from 'omnipresentwords.wordpress.com'; "I have been a member of this site since November 2012 and I have earned good reviews on this site. This growing reputation and stellar reviews helped me in landing two high value projects, one for $ 5000 (Translation of 250 pages from Spanish to English) and another for $ 7500 (Sending out business emails to Top Executives for a Business Consultancy Firm), with my account balance by Christmas 2012 having a net balance of $ 1500. After the initial bid and customized samples being provided as per their requests, both the projects were awarded to me and a 100 % milestone payment was created for each. Yes, it was a happy Christmas and the new year looked promising with both the projects scheduled to end on January 22nd and 25th 2013 respectively. The acceptance of the projects had already caused a debit of $ 1250 as commission charged by Freelancer.com, even before the milestones had been released.". 

The testimony continues as the victim explains: "Within a short time, I received a mail from the freelancer.com staff that my account had been limited due to security reasons, pending which I would be unable to withdraw or transfer funds from my account. I was asked to provide a Government Issued Identity document, a residential proof as well as a recent photograph of mine which was supposed to be taken in a manner similar to convicts in my country and answer some questions to elaborate more on the project which I had done. My $ 14000 were at stake, I had no option but to comply. I complied. Not once but three times and every time I got the standard request to resubmit scans of a different id every time with each mail ending with a ‘We look forward to your cooperation and understanding’. And today when I logged in to my account on the site, I saw to my horror that my account balance has been reduced to $ 99 with both of the previous two projects declared invalid and the accounts of both those employers blocked. Neither of the employers, on being contacted via email, have had their money refunded by the site, which means that the money is still with the site."

A different review came from an employer; this review can be found in 'http://sandipsekhon.com'. "The reason why Freelancer has been able to acquire many competitors is because of their profitability. And that profit comes from fleecing their users as hard as possible. The moment you register on the site they try to make you pay for everything and anything. From paying so that your project is available straight away without a review (even though they go live in a few minutes anyway) to prompting you every at every step to become a paying member to get crappy ‘perks’. At the moment, they’re even trying to flog Freelancer baseball caps.

The review continues "And their crafty fees don’t stop there. While going through old emails on one of my gmail accounts, I realized that I had a Freelancer account under a different username too – it was my vWorker account that had been transferred over. Out of curiosity, I logged into it and was pleasantly surprised to see a positive balance of around $130 on the account. That was from funds that I had in vWorker before they were acquired and had forgotten about. After looking into it in more depth, I was stunned to see that this amount originally sat at over $200. Freelancer had quietly been taking $10 a month as an ‘inactivity fee’. I had never received any notification of this. A quick email saying: “Hey Sandip, check your account or we’re gonna start taking a fee” would have sufficed. But of course, in true Freelancer.com style it’s all about making money wherever you can." 

Freelancer.com abysmal disregard for customer care and complete negligence to support employers really makes this website truly despicable, as it only seems to care to make money, and not provide a valuable service to its users. This is why I highly recommend people to stay away from freelancer.com and to look for alternatives, as I am sure they are out there. Furthermore, this a trend a see a lot in the internet; thus it is imperative for us as a community to take action, and actively boycott these immoral people, so that they may never profit from the desperation of those seeking employment or looking for employees.  

College Is A Scam - Honest Review Of The Hague University of Applied Sciences

The Hague University of Applied Sciences, also known as de Haagse Hogeschool, is the primary institution of higher learning in the city of the Hague, in the Netherlands. Also, it is a good representation of what is wrong with higher education in today's society.

This is a honest review coming from personal experience. I was customer for this institution and I am merely reviewing the services I received during my academic years. So this is just my opinion, however, I do hope you can find some value in what I have to say.

If you read articles such as; The College Scam, written by reason.com, you can see a quite thorough explanation of what is wrong with American colleges; however, hardly a word is mentioned about their European counterparts. Though, in Europe higher education is far cheaper than in the States; the system is still riddle with mediocrity and in no way prepares for entering the labor market.

First of all, when looking at reviews online about this University you will find that there are a lot of positive reviews, and that many people "had fun" and there was big "international community". However, it is my opinion that these reviews are either fake or made by imbeciles who just came to the Hague to party instead of study. Interestingly enough, the couple of bad reviews you can find on the internet are quite detailed in regards to the programs and administration. Thus, making me really question the legitimacy of any positive review you can find, as the positive reviews just talk about how nice the Hague is, and about how much fun you will have when you move here.

For me, the Hague University was at best mediocre, and at worst, a scam institution wasting taxpayer money. I was studying social sciences and though I would really love to mention names of teachers and staff that I have encountered, I will not, as it might ruin their careers and that is not something I am interested in doing. What I do want is for prospective students to know the truth, and to choose a different institution of learning.

For my first two years I was introduced to an enormous amount of bullocks, which the teachers referred to as "theory". It was basically leftist propaganda about how the world works mixed with management/administration and accounting. To be fair, the management and the accounting was descent; however, it could still be greatly improved. Moreover, the social aspect was very ideological and never presented different view points, much less an opposing one. Lastly, the very worst of the first two years was that I was taught things that did not help me to get a job. All that theory was basically useless, because no employer ever since has required me to know any of that jargon. I guess the only exception is accounting, but other than that, even the management theory is pretty useless in the real world.

For example, we had a course called "Intercultural Communication", which, involved writing a story about people from different cultures. Not only was the assignment ludicrous, but also the teacher was more interested in teaching ethics than intercultural communication, which was reflected in the grading. Later we found out that the teacher specializes in ethics, no wonder we had such a course. But the worst course of all, was writing for a Wiki website that nobody would ever use or see. The wiki course lasted for two entire semesters and it was pretty useless. We could have just written stuff for the real Wikipedia, instead we were writing for something that isn't even online, and it was with the purpose of introducing us to technology. I mean how archaic, and besides, it does not take two entire semesters to learn how to edit a wiki page.

The last two years of my program were more practical and I was asked to do an internship for a period of six months. When looking for the internship I realized how serious my employment problem was, and how useless all I have learned had been. Mind you, I applied for internships related to my field of study, so it should have been somewhat easy, but no, it was very difficult and I had to use my own network in order to find an internship. Of course, the school did not provide any help, and the teacher supervising us was just there to justify his salary. He literally did nothing to helped us, even though he was responsible for the internship course. Moreover, he even failed to showed up to important meetings with students and employers, as he forgot he had made the appointments, what a rude person! The worst part is that if you do that to him he will be very offended and probably downgrade you. Also, we had a course specifically designed to help us find internship placement; the course consisted of basically writing a CV, cover letter, and making an interview with an employer. Naturally, the interview was fictional, so you do not actually have to interview an employer. It would be nice if that was part of the requirement.  This course lasted for an entire semester, what a waste!

I also encountered teachers who were somewhat racists and outright rude. In my case, I had a teacher who told me I would never be able to find employment in a certain company I wanted to apply to. He said that to me, right after I mentioned I would love to work for them. Also, before that incident, I never really had a problem with that teacher, so I was surprised when he said that. Later on, I found out that he was saying similar things to other students, and he was actually rather infamous for being a dick. This trend escalated as my time passed in this institution.

The other big problem with this University is its administration. The school has a very bad reputation with regards to their inner management. In my case, I had to chase for months teachers and administrators in order to obtain my credits. The problem arose from the fact that some of the subjects I took were from a different faculty, and even though I had an official approval from the examination board, my credits were never awarded. Of course, I complained, and after a long chase and plenty of ass-kissing I got the credits that were rightfully mine to begin with. Interestingly enough, when I mentioned this problem to my classmates they told me they also had similar issues. So it became apparent that the school administration was just extremely incompetent.

Overall, the Hague University fails miserably at helping students prepare for the labor market. Even though they assure you of the opposite. This trend is common across all social sciences and in most the western world. So the sooner people get away from them the better. Also, if you really want to go to University, then I highly recommend a different institution. Otherwise, you will surely regret your decision. Consider yourselves warned, and be sure to stay out of this school.

Chitika Going Berserk!

So, I recently started using Chitika ads services and after just a couple a days my account was terminated due to fraudulent click activities. The interesting thing was that during my time Chitika, all my reports showed that zero clicks were ever made. This makes sense as my blog is small, but I do not understand why they terminated my account, especially since nobody ever made a single click to any of the ads and the reports show it.


After, doing some research online, I found that this is a common occurrence with many Chitika users. Fortunately for me, I did not lose any money; however, it could have been a big problem if your account can suddenly be terminated; especially, if you are driving-in a lot of traffic and making serious money. Of course, this is also common practice for other companies, such as; google ad-sense, who are infamous for terminating accounts based on pure conjecture. This can be detrimental if you are counting on the advertisement income.


This behavior is unacceptable and it should not be tolerated. Thus, I recommend people to avoid Chitika and Ad-sense. There are plenty of alternatives, and a quick search online will provide you with many more ways to create ad-revenue. Also, you may also want to consider to advertise your own products, or perhaps exclusive advertise certain products from a company of your choice. If you are generating enough traffic, then nothing should stop you from earning more ad-revenues. Chitika and Ad-sense started out as great companies; however, now they have become monstrous and arrogant. If they choose to treat their partners in such a bad manner, then so be it, we will not use your services, and we will move on to a different company.


For me, I think the best course of action is to keep producing good content, drive-in traffic, and then choose a method of advertisement that best suits you. A direct deal with a company selling a product that you believe in would be the ideal situation; however, even if that cannot be possible that are still many more alternatives one can try.


 

Happyminer Actually Works!

Around a year ago I opened an account in happyminer.com to see if this method would actually work for making money online. Fortunately, I am glad to announce that this method does work and is legit.

If you been following my blog you know that we only provide honest reviews. Also, I will not benefit in any way by you investing in this method, since there are no referral programs nor do I own a happyminer's account at the moment.

In this image you can see the money I received after using happyminer for three months. I initially bought an account for 10 USD and after a couple of month I sold it for 28,53 USD. Not bad for something that requires practically no effort. The only important factor in this method is time. As the longer you wait the more money you will make. Having said that, I would like to clarify that is not a way for getting rich quick. It is simply making an investment in a game account in order to sell it later at a higher price. It is quite straight forward, but is definitely no way to get rich over night. Nonetheless, I do recommend happyminer for anyone who is interested in making an extra buck in the coming months. Or better yet, as a long term investment for the coming year!

Lastly, I would recommend starting your happyminer endeavor by buying an account from virtaex instead of opening a new one from happyminer.com. This is because if you open a new account  it would take many years until you can actually cash in anything. So the fastest way to make money would be to invest in an account for 10 USD, and then re-sell it a few months later.

So what are you waiting for? give it a try and let me know how your experience was in the comments below. Also do not forget to suggest new business ideas you want me to review.