A year and a half ago when I first began looking for opportunities to make money online I signed up with a company called The Freelance Work Exchange. According to the ads which were all over the internet, I could pay $2.95 to get access to 1000’s of online freelance jobs, including freelance writing gigs which as a writer I was most interested in. After the first month the monthly subscription price went up to $29.95.
At first it seemed like a legitimate opportunity, and since I had made up my mind that I was going to find a way to work from home, hopefully as a writer, I initially figured a monthly investment of nearly thirty dollars was worth it. Boy, was I wrong! In fact I ended up wishing I had researched this opportunity more thoroughly. Like many of the other opportunities I had paid money to try and then lost my cash such as “get paid to stuff envelopes” and others, this one was no different.
One of the main problems with the Freelance Work Exchange or Go Freelance as they are now calling themselves is that many of the job listings can be found other places for free. Yup, you heard right, many of the jobs can be found elsewhere for free! Imagine my disgust when I began finding the same jobs listed at the Freelance Work Exchange website on places like sologig.com and sunoasis.com. So, I was paying $29.95 a month to get job opportunities that others were getting for FREE! As you can imagine I was pretty upset when I realized what was going on.
Another problem that I noticed with Freelance Work Exchange/Go Freelance is that the same ads stayed up for weeks at a time with few or no new ads being posted. Now let me tell you that was a real eye opener. My reason for paying their fee to begin with was to find leads to writing and other freelance opportunities that were going to pay me so that I could work from home. However, how was I supposed to do that with the same stale ads week after week? Not only that but the longer an ad stayed up, the more suckers like myself that they had conned out of $29.95 by the second month were going to apply for them. More applicants equals less possibility of getting the freelance opportunity. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that the website was not being maintained on a regular basis.
Oh, did I mention the free e-books that are supposed to tell you other ways you can make money by freelancing? I didn’t? Well, I will now. Another carrot that the Freelance Work Exchange/Go Freelance uses is that they will send you e-books that have been written by the founder which tell you how to maximize your online income, and how the founder did it. Well, here’s the thing, those e-books were horribly outdated by the time I got my copies, and almost all the links inside were dead. Now, that should tell you something right there, getting an e-book that supposedly has the keys to the kingdom but that is full of dead links. Clearly the only thing these books had going for them was that they were e-books and not paperbacks, and were not wasting paper. Other than that, they were worthless.
But guess what? Not only were the links in the e-books dead…but many of the links on their website were dead, or lead to pages saying they were under construction and would be back up soon, only they never were. That was one of the things that really ticked me off, I mean here I was paying good money for freelance job leads, and I’d click on a link to do so, or to get more information and the link would be dead or indefinitely under construction. The sad thing too is that many times the dead links were to places within the website to get more information on how to make more money using their website. Now would someone please tell me why the heck a company would sabotage themselves this way? Clearly they didn’t care. The whole idea was to get your money, which leads me to my next gripe about this company.
First let me say that I was extremely lucky. When I signed up for this bogus opportunity I used my paypal account which allowed me to use paypal to cancel the subscription when I discovered that it was a scam. However, others that I know did not. Many used their credit or debit cards. Those that did so and figured out that it was a scam were pretty much stuck for at least a few months. Here’s why. While this website does have a link to unsubscribe, it takes you all over the website clicking on link after link. Meanwhile while you are doing everything you can think of to get a real body either on the phone, or by e-mail, they continue to charge you the monthly fee. That’s right, you keep getting charged. Another bad thing about this company is if you look at the new website that they have indexed in Google, it is powered by a Greek company. This is no news to me as when I looked up their information on the old website much of the contact information was not from the United States but overseas, so actually getting to the company to cancel your subscription or to contact them for some other reason was very difficult. There is a US address listed as their new website, but it is questionable as to whether it is legitimate or not.
I suspect that the reason the Freelance Work Exchange has changed its name to Go Freelance is because of the bad reputation it has garnered under the old name. The company is probably hoping that by changing its name it can change its image, but don’t be fooled. This company is not a legitimate opportunity to find freelance work. With all the free freelancing job lists that are available online there is no reason anyone should have to pay their hard earned cash to find jobs. So, do yourself a favor and steer clear of the Freelance Work Exchange/Go Freelance because it is not a legitimate opportunity to find freelance work.
