Writer scammed by a buyer!

[laserlife]

Hi guys, just wanted to share my experience with a buyer who got away with some free work done 😦



I produce articles and written content for my customers, and on this particular instance, I was supposed to summarize a source text in less than 2 pages. The source text was a report, about 40pages long, and I turned it into a solid summary, according to the customer´s guidelines and requests. I delivered the work on time, and as usual, I offered to make any change or modification if there was any problem with my output. He sounded super harsh and wrote:



“I am not in any way happy with this order. You didn’t summarize this article. My nephew is 7 years old and I feel that he could have produced a better summary.” Based on your low-level performance I will ask for a refund- requesting cancellation right after.



Don´t get me wrong, I can definitely take criticism and I am very objective about my work, but in this case, things did not add up. I certainly did provide a professional, compelling summary of the article that was absolutely up to specs and well written. In 3 years on fiverr, nobody ever repudiated my work like this,and I am 99% certain that this buyer was just a guy who wanted a free work done.



He basically ordered all the most expensive extras, including extra fast, then simply refused to even give me a chance to fix what he though it was wrong with my piece.



Nonetheless, panicking, I pushed the “agree to cancel” button. Right after, I meant to contact the buyer and confront him with my point of view…but I realized that it was no longer possible to get in touch with him through fiverr in any way. He probably blocked me and got away with some free work. I did consider contacting the CS, but I don´t think there´s anything they can do.



The truth is that some buyers are getting “smart”, and they are trying to leverage on the power of the threat of negative feedback over sellers 😦



Sorry for the long rant, just wanted to share my experience. Anybody faced a similar situation? How do you handle “freeloaders”?