Elance
Complaint 134616 Details

We signed up to Elance to have a VOIP system set up for us. The person who won the job was "arheops" or "Alexander Merkulav". He had many positive reviews and NO negative reviews. After 2 online chat sessions which he instigated outside of elance through google chat, it turned out that the information he wanted could not be obtained from our current telephone company (Telstra technicians had no idea what DSLAM was, nor could they give us the technical details we needed to proceed). Cut a long story short, nothing happened for many months (about 5) and he regularly updated the Elance status to "0% complete - waiting on customer" which was true. In the end we both agreed that the job could never be completed becuase I couldn't get the information he needed.
I offered to pay him something for his time (which amounted to around 40 minutes in 2 x google chat sessions which is the fair thing to do). Instead, I got a cancellation request, which I confimed and we left it at that. Some time later, we decided to give it another go as we suspected after some research that there were options other than the ones suggested by Alexander (arheops).
When we checked the account, there were $0 in our account when it should have been credited from the Elance trust account. I searched the emails and found the one that asked for confirmation of cancelling the job and it clearly stated that the funds would be transferred from Elance Escrow to us. Evidently this didnt happen. After a few emails with Elance, the fobbed us off and told us to ask Alexander to agree to pay the funds into our account. Fat chance of that happening. Our response from Alexander was that he didn't remember the job and he even stated something along the lines of "How do I know you are the real customer, you could have accessed their account". It became obvious that he had no intention of returning the funds and was playing games. Instead we contacted our credit card company and there was no joy there either.
It turns out that Elance get a commission, so there is no motivation to repay the funds. The contractor gets the protection of Elance because they suspend your account the moment you submit any kind of dispute, which prevents you from filing negative reviews and explains all the positive reviews for this contractor. Elance won't even acknowlege thier own emails so mountains of evidence is not going to help either. Overall, it's a scam.