I Got Scammed

We naively figured that we could turn a side project into a business with a couple snaps of our fingers.

We needed a frontend engineer but were bootstrapping so needed to keep it affordable. Knowing full well that recruiting a person remotely was risky, we set up a multi round interview on a freelancer website. First, a written application where we selected ~8 candidates out of dozens. Then, a phone screen where we selected 2 out of 8. Finally, a coding exercise where the candidate solved a real frontend issue we were having (and we paid them for it).

We extended an offer to one of the candidates. They had years of experience and even an article on Business Insider about their extreme work ethic in software freelancing.

Their work started off well. We kept our QA process strict, and if we found issues then we would surface them. The fix would come through.

This person then told us they could no longer get paid through the freelancer website - they had been flagged as suspicious on the freelancing platform.

We asked them to pause development until the issue was resolved.

They kept working by pushing new code to the repo. Then, they were permanently banned for unknown reasons (according to them).

We chose to pay them for the work done and terminated the relationship.

Turns out the person was just the face of the org. They claimed to be a solo freelancer but subcontracted the work out.

We kept our heads up and said good lesson to learn while this was still a peanuts project. Onwards!

So we reached out to the second candidate that we had interviewed to talk them again.

We hopped on an audio call...but the person's voice was completely different than what we remembered. We demanded they go on video. It was someone entirely different.

Another person, another ring of developers.

Either choice we would have taken would have ended with the same result.