Inducing new (fraud) projects to increase bid package sell

You know that bids are limited for users in Freelancer.com. The more you spend bids the more you are prone to spend money to buy bid quota. Else you will have to wait for the recovery time after which you will be given 1 bid. Freelancer.com is exploiting users by this mechanism. They are inducing false projects to let freelancers spend their bids and later spend money to buy more bid package.




How? Go to any of the project pages. There they will show you message showing "post similar project". What happens when you click on that? A new project creating page gets open with the text copying from the original project! If you simply post the project it will go online as open for bidding.


After that freelancers spend from their limited bid quota to bid on that duplicate project! By bidding on a duplicate test case project they lose their bids for nothing. In addition think about the lost time and labor that they put while creating the proposal, sample.


Freelancer.com could categories such duplicate projects as test projects and not for original bidding. But they didn't. Why? The simple answer is - to indirectly force freelancers spend money in purchasing bid package to increase bid quota.


The more projects (with duplicate ones), the more bidding and thus the more sell of bidding package! It is very unfortunate that despite they take enough project fee from the project winners, they are not happy with that and applying such techniques.


This "copying the text from the original project" is a clever technique to induce people press the post button. Those who want to see what happens after posting a project will see that everything is ready with original looking things; why not post it and see what happens! This thing actually creates several projects with duplicate contents, owners of which never select a freelancer. Bidders effort go in vein.


A very significant side of this game is that the site induces such duplicate even false projects. To gain experience point one has post a project. By this they are inducing people to post project to get fancy experience points. These actually ends up in creating "non real" projects created just for getting those experience points. At the end of the day, freelancers are the losers as they have spent bid, time and labor for a "test case project" or for a "non real project posted only to get fancy experience points".


And freelancer.com? They fulfilled their target - freelancers who lost their bids in placing their proposals on those projects start spending money to buy more bid packages without even getting any hints that who is responsible for the lost bids, time and effort which.