I have heard of this website a lot, ranks number 1 in freelance jobs or freelance work for me like keywords.
I am a SEO professional and thought of doing some freelance work from this site as most of my colleagues and friends are doing freelancing.
Then I downloaded their app and applied for free trial version and applied few bids for a few project. None were approved, all are closed now.
Also one lady named Soumya messeged me personally prior to accept my bid. She sent a word doc file and sent her US phone number to contact her in WhatsApp. These kind of activity made me feel suspicious and fraudulent. If she wanted to share her number she could have shared it in the chat itself. To test my work she could have shared the file then post judging she could have accepted my bid.
These kind of fraud people are up in freelancer website and posting job are free. So they are posting jobs and in chats they are bullshitting with freelancers and finally wasting our time.
Since then I have lost trust and stopped using it. There are many profiles that show how many times freelancers have been accepted to work on projects and earned some points. I am unsure if they are real at all and how it is so famous if they are doing something wrong.
Freelancers who are new to it and are not willing to take their paid services must have some option to get free services. Post completion of a project, freelancer.com can cut commission for itself from clients paying us for a job.