I’ve used eLance for various outsourcing projects for a number of years.
(Great for small tasks, and an extra pair of hands until the 25th hour in a day is discovered!)

Sure, I’ve had my fair share of problems, however, all have been amicably resolved, talking with eLance and the contractor.

WebHouse
(Md. Zakir Hossain Dakua)

Recently, I had a small requirement for a WordPress theme to be slightly customised.
Unfortunately, I was heading off on holiday, so needed to outsource it, to meet my clients timescale.

I posted the job up on eLance, and had the usual 30 or so bids.

One of those, was from WebHouse (Zak D.), from Shabujbag, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Real name – Md. Zakir Hossain Dakua.
Just in case you’ve had contact from him directly, his email address is:
zakirdaq@gmail.com

I’m usually pretty good at spotting the “bulls*t” in the initial communication (typically, they’ll just say “yes” to everything")

The fixed price work was completed, and he immediately began pressuring me to release the escrow.
He also changed the job to “complete” which meant escrow would auto-release.

Due to my holiday, I didn’t have chance to review the code, was just able to check the basic functionality.

Later, when more data had been added, it was apparent there was a problem with his code.
I asked to get him to fix his own bugs, and here is where the problems started.

A contractor can create a job on your behalf!

On eLance a contractor can create a paid hourly job on your behalf, without you authorising it!
This is what happened. I asked him repeatedly to tell me how long in hours, it would take (and therefore how much) Obviously I got no reply.

WebHouse offered no reply, until he submitted a time-sheet for over 7 hours (at $20/hour) to fix these bugs.

I rejected this, however, but, was on vacation when the “review period” deadline was.

I had emailed eLance to state that I do not authorise them to charge my card.
Heck, I even cancelled my credit card before I went!

However, eLance ignored all of this, and charged my card anyway (damn pre-authorisation must of kicked in!)

Since then, I’ve had nothing but bad news from eLance support who refuse to help.

But why should they? They get their 10% commission from the $150 odd I have been scammed by.
They claim that their “WorkView” process is bullet proof, and that I could review the screenshots… etc…
This is all true, but the work he was doing, was to fix bugs he had created, on work that had already been paid for!

WebHouse has been very unhelpful, right from the start of my dispute.
Stating that the work was done, it was quality work etc…
He even started getting rude, calling me “mad” for doubting the quality of his work (all in hard to decipher, broken English)

I’m using this blog post to drive home how poor his work really was!

I just hope a prospective client stumbles across this post, and choses to decline his bid, before being let down in a similar way to me!

Resolution

Elance finally agreed (after many emails) that there was a problem with the way WebHouse worked.
Although, unfortunately, they wouldn’t take the money back off him, they did credit me with $75.

So, moral of the story, I guess:
Don’t use eLance WorkView, or eLance at all for that matter!
I’ve since moved to oDesk. Far more reliable.