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Dodgy Fiverr 'developers' that damage existing websites


pinnacle_lawyer

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I have had people come to me rather upset in circumstances where they have hired a fiverr dev to fix a website issue. The end result is their website is in a far worse situation than it was before they ordered the gig. This is a growing problem as their appears to be a number of web design sellers who are completely unskilled, working on jobs way out of their depth and ultimately cause more problems than they fix. There are a few courses of action to take here, but first and foremost the money for the gig needs to be refunded.



Best regards,



Mark

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I agree. I also want to stress another point of the dangers of letting people who pretend to be helping you, but actually install things on your webhosting server that will be used to send spam out and do other malicious thing using your id.



Warning: By giving someone you don’t even know and trust access to your hosting CPanel, FTP and CMS can potentially compromise you in a big way.

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  • 4 months later...

It is not always easy to spot these bad sellers.

I recently (today…) had to cancel a gig from an underperforming seller - and by underperforming I mean they failed in every aspect to do the job, including not being able to access the site control panel, despite me giving them usernames, passwords, urls and step by step guides… - whom I had researched by reading their feedback, checking their previous work as best I could etc.

There was nothing to alert me to the fact that I would have to cancel my gig and then find out that the seller had in fact accessed the control panel and used that access to delete every post, every page and every item from the media library - over 50,000 items in total deleted.

It is going to take me forever to get this site back to where it was before this seller got involved, and I face the downtime whilst I do, all of which is going to lose me even more money.

And of course Fiverr wont release the sellers details to my lawyers for confidentiality reasons…

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I find it interesting that you would give such private information to unknown people when the risks can be so high–and not even make a backup!

I wouldn’t–and if I was seeking help, I would not be looking on Fiverr. I would be seeking reputable companies with an established track record. Not just a few crappy 5 star outstanding reviews.

This is a ‘growing problem’ because you’re not paying a decent amount of money for a specialist skill, and neither are you doing your research prior to ordering. It’s a ripe market for easy money and dodgy people. Greed on both sides, in other words.

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Guest robinhawaii

Your lawyers should know how to file a “John Doe” lawsuit, they then file a discovery subpoena and serve it to Fiverr in order for them to disclose who the person is and where they are located. (It may turn out they are not in the courts jurisdiction, but at least you know). In several states you may file a subpoena for small claims court too, so your lawsuit doesn’t need to cost you very much. But again, since you already have a team of lawyer on you payroll, they should have told you this 😉

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Guest robinhawaii

Always save a back up!

Maybe OP can check an Internet archives site to see if there are copies of his pages, at least it’s better than starting completely over.

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