Is Odesk freelance job site a scam?  This is a question which people have repeatedly asked.  So I thought about writing it so that I can help people understand why Odesk is not a scam and how to avoid yourself getting scammed by someone else through Odesk.

I think Odesk can be compared with Newspaper or like Google.

If a person sees a Newspaper Ad about a company that has offered to pay $1 billion and joins the company to find that he is not going to pay him $1, I do not think he can say the Newspaper is a scam? Can he?

Is it possible on the part of the newspaper to go and verify every Ad? May be if they could have done that, it would have been great, but then in reality it is the reader's headache to verify it. However, if we find a fraud, may be informing the newspaper about it may help it review it before placing the same ad again. Whatever the case, we cannot call the Newspaper a fraud can we?

See the Adwords ads on Google? Make money like this and like that and 1000 different type of rotten ads exist... but then Google cannot go after each ad placer and verify the authenticity?

Well... Odesk has a similar role... It helps place Buyer's Job Openings' Ad on Odesk and lets those who are searching for jobs to find it. Unlike a newspaper or an internet ad, here there is an additional advantage where one can know the history of the buyer and provider.

After that it is just like in the real world. There are chances that you may get cheated or you may not get cheated. Odesk cannot go after each provider or buyer to verify if he is not going to cheat.

People who join Odesk are not from heaven. They are from our dirty real world. There may be good ones and bad ones, be it a provider or be it a buyer. There are times when buyer gets cheated and many times when provider gets cheated.

Even the review system cannot be told as foolproof. What if someone does 10 jobs between $1 to $100 perfectly well and gets perfect scores and runs away with the money when he is assigned a $5000 job and paid full advance ?!

My conclusion is that Odesk helps buyers and providers meet each other (and makes money out of it), but anything beyond that is the buyer's and provider's responsibility. It is not a 100% foolproof system, but then it is better than many of the systems for online work and it is progressively being improved based on input.