I got scammed by a cheat(seller)

[phatmaniac]

I GOT SCAMMED BY A CHEAT

Hey guys I want to pick your ideas on this. I have been royally screwed by this seller on Fiverr. He was giving me 2 unique articles for 5$. The articles were excellent- I had no suspicion as he was a relatively new seller. I checked copyscape which said its unique- great kept on reordering to about 600$ worth over 2-3 months. I tried to respin one of those articles and found out this from their customer support

if you were paying a writer for this article, that writer is scamming you by promising you a unique article and instead is copying someone else’s article and switching all of the characters to Russian and Greek characters that look like regular alphabet characters.

I have done enough checks to verify this is true.eg- http://asciivalue.com/

My question is I know you have like a couple of weeks after an order is completed to be paid back but what about this? I was never given what was advertised? I have opened a ticket this might take a while to get answered just wanted to hear from you guys here first on similar experiences and what was the outcome. I am not worried about a good lot of those transactions as they were through Paypal( using Credit Card) but the other part is services under paypals agreement which wouldnt cover me.

[fastcopywriter]

Once an order is delivered, it will be marked as complete in 3-days. You say his articles passed copyscape, so how could he have cheated? Also, how do you know it was Russian or Greek? Those languages have entirely different alphabets, Russian is in Cyrillic, you have to be a Russian to be able to read that. They don’t use the Latin alphabet we’re used to.

You could write to customer service, but again, you say you got scammed and yet you bought articles from him from him, $600! Seems to me very unfair to give someone $600 and then call him a cheat.

Just don’t hire him anymore.

[hagcel]

They are not “russian or greek”. They are unicode ascii characters that look like normal letters. So when he does a match through copyscape, all the vowels are replaced by VERY similar symbols, which means copyscape will get a 0 match, since no words actually match. 1m4g1n3 4ll 7h3s3 numb3rs l00k l1k3 l3773rs, That’s how copyscape sees it. Pretty clever on the scammer’s part. Not only that, it has zero seo value, as the words aren’t machine readable.

[emmaki]

I don’t really understand the complaint… fastseowriter is correct–there are very few chars in the Greek alphabet that look like regular latin letters. Here’s a κωικ ΣελεκτιοΝ…

LATIN–GR

Aa – Αα
Bb–Ββ (although this is more a v sound)
Nn–Νν
Oo–Οο (that works!)
Yy–Υυ
Kk–Κκ
Hh–Ηη
Pp–Ρρ (technically Ππ)
Mm–Μμ
Xx–Χχ
Zz–Ζζ
Tt–Ττ
Ee–Εε

I mean, I wouldn’t even need some machine to point out those discrepancies. I’m not as familiar with Cyrillic, but that has its own typography even for familiar letters.

Assuming you got a regular English article, why not just quickly retype one out normally then put it through Copyscape? Also, $600 before checking all this? Maybe your writer just has some weird keyboard fetish going on, but then again, I don’t know the whole story here. Also, bear in mind that you can ‘write’ on some tablets, but the input may use some techno doo-dah to put it into type.

All in all, did you communicate with the seller or are you just mad because you can’t respin these articles super-fast? Because for whatever reason this happened, it seems like an awful lot of work to ‘cheat’ you. I’m on the fence here until I have more details.

(PS NO I DO NOT ACCEPT GREEK WRITING GIGS, MY GRAMMAR IS A HORRIFIC MESS)

[whitehatseo10]

Waw… I had a similar experience with an indian seller, but until now I never understood why his articles can’t be spinned.

[Guest robinhawaii]

You can copy and paste different sections of his work into Google Search, just put it in quotation marks. If you start finding perfect hits, then you have proof he plagiarized the work, and show that to customer service.

[belengarcia]

That’s a new (maybe not that new) trend among article scammers.
The explanation is quite simple. When you copy-paste, you are not really copy-pasting the letters, but their representation based in certain encoding system.
It’s possible to choose, for example, a Greek or Russian encoding, but write the text using our regular characters (both Russian and Greek include them), so you can see “hello” and you don’t notice that the encoding is Russian. But, if you copy-paste that “hello” in a copyscape app that word is different from “hello” written with our encoding. That’s perfect for scammers. They just copy a random article from the Internet, paste it into an editor, change the encoding, and for a human eye the article is the same, but for a machine, the text is a different one.

[emmaki]

Have to say, that’s a new one with me.

[magy1808]

I just don t understand why would someone go trough so much bother…isn t is easier to just write an article? 😑

[mkerogazov]

It is if you can write articles, but it is also easy to do chtrl+H and then put a and replace it with а < this one is Russian, but looks exactly the same as English. It’s a bit harder with Greek, but there are plenty of characters in Russian that look like English 😉

[emmaki]

ОК, товарищ! That capital K is gnarly

[fastcopywriter]

That’s very scary, I had no idea there were scams like that.

[iwillhookuup]

wow…damn…I hope you get compensation back or at least get that person banned.

[graphicempire]

Yes this is unique Encoding. There are so many free websites out there you can simply copy any article from ezinearticle and just paste it to these websites, then press spin. Even the original creator was not able to recognize through google search or copyscape. This is pure encoding, text will be converted to codes and worst result is that its 0 seo value. But you can recognize these encoding easily, when you asked any seller to deliver the file using word document all text will be highlighted with red underline, because its not text. I don’t think so that you will get back all your money that you spend, might be the seller will be banned from fiverr.

[jamesbulls]

So, what I hear you saying is that you went from $5 for two articles to $600 for a whole bunch more? That’s a little like holding hands on the first date and then starring next to Ron Jeremy on the second date. Your mistake here is that you put your $600 egg in one basket. If you had parceled this out as six $100 eggs, you would have noticed the encoding much sooner and be facing less liability now.

[akamar]

Not if you have no knack for actually writing.

[misscrystal]

Nice use of simile there james!

[saltairecleanin]

Here is an example of a document that I received from a seller that encoded the project I purchased. The article passed copyscape 100% but when I did a keyword check, It showed the encoded characters. I then went to my text editor and changed the font to “kalinga” (an open type font) and, as you can see, revealed the encoding.

I hope this helps.

[madein5rr]

I’m a native Russian speaker.
There are similar symbols in both languages.
English - Russian
Aa - Аа
Bb - Вв
Cc - Сс
Dd - no match
Ee - Ее
Ff - no match
Gg - no match
Hh - Нн
Ii - Іі (not Russian, but Ukrainian)
Jj - no match
Kk - Кк
Ll - no match
Mm - Мм
Nn - no match (just similar small п)
Oo - Оо
Pp - Рр
Qq - no match
Rr - no match (just similar small г)
Ss - no match
Tt - Тт
Uu - no match
Vv - no match
Ww - no match
Xx - Хх
Yy - Уу
Zz - no match

[mary19791]

I am a writer but I have hired writers in the past for large projects. I have never trusted copyscape by itself to check work because of this reason. If you quote a paragraph or two from each article and put it into google search it will be more effective than copyscape as some of the other people have said above. That really sucks though that you have $600 worth of useless articles. I can’t imagine spending that much on something I could not even use. Feel for you. 😦

[thewriterfiver]

As messed up as this is, the ingenuity of it all has me reeling. Exactly how far will scamming evolve in the future?

As for OP, I really am sorry to hear about this. I wish there was a way to really get the word out on techniques like these and prevent others from falling victim to it. Hopefully, you can get some sort of reimbursement.

[dianeherneyvo]

My goodness! Thank you for posting this information. The best way to help at this point, is to inform others. If you had suffered in silence then the scam will continue unabated. A lot of good will come from this post.