The curious case of Milestone payment - experience of Peter Jimenez from Miami, FL

At freelancer.com there is a feature called milestone payment which is sometimes called as escrow by the users. This feature is supposed to give the worker guarantee that the employer deposited payments which is to be released to the worker after completion of the project/partial project. Once employers put money in milestone payment system only the destined worker can receive or cancel the payment. What happens when the worker neither contact the employer nor does continue the project? What happens to the deposited money? Here is the story of a victim employer.


Peter Jimenez from Miami, FL who is a Business owner at Marketronix and PeterJWebMaster.com commented on a hub with his experience with freelancer.com. Once he posted a project there and approved milestone payment for selected bidder. But later the bidder company neither accepted the project nor they canceled the milestone payment. In fact they were totally out of contact.

In such a situation Peter Jimenez, contacted the site to refund his money as the bidder didn't accepted the project. For a project which actually never began, the outsourcing site could refund him easily.

Peter Jimenez wrote -

        I asked them: "what happens to my money if ...
        a) they go out of business
        b) the owner dies
        c) they just ignore me

        The company replied - "there's nothing we can do about it, sir"

After asking that where is the money now he got the answer -

        "THE MONEY STAYS IN FREELANCER.COM".

When a bidder has not accepted the project and thus the project never actually started why should they keep the money for themselves? Milestone payment supposed to secure worker's payment. But freelancer.com is actually using it to keep the employer's money for themselves where possible.

It should be noted that Peter Jimenez at last got his money back by winning the fight against freelancer.com's foggy system. When an agent came to that post to keep their image clean, Peter Jimenez vividly refuted their lame excuses.

You may be wondering that what can be the purpose of withholding user's money. The answer is the blocked money can earn interest as long as it is kept in their account. So the more evil, the more interest or money to invest elsewhere.