In the last weeks, may i say months, i was faced with 17 clients on this site that were requesting paid services on the site.. these guys supposely accepted some other coders offers before mine because i always charge a higher rate and i do not ask to be paid before the code is provided in case i can't provide it... this is my security for the clients themselves... if i can't do it, i'm not paid.
these clients, in most case were back at me after 2 or 3 weeks asking me if i was able to answer their request because the first offer scammed them or abandonned them without any news... i was not available anymore due to a long term contract, but hey, they came back with feedback at least.
the problem with that is that again, some scammers are acting on this site, and nobody is protected, and usually, as it's a long period of time between the task taken and the scam appear, the guy is safe... and a lot of clients instead of updating their situations are just quitting the place and go search for coders in other places like sitepoint.com ...
this place is going down in the case of Paid Requests... mainly because of 2 or 3 scammers that always show their nose just when they are attacked... they are silent for months for their clients, but when someone talk about them, they show up, telling the more incredible stories...
so i would suggest something:
instead of banning these scammers, CLOSE the forum #30 ... Paid Services
let someone open a real professional site for services and more... or better, give the approval to become the vbulletin.net .... the "net" would mean "commercial on the net" for sure!
... scammers are always here, making profit on our back... because most of the time, people will cease asking here because they are ignored, abandonned or scammed... how many were giving feedback to tell they were happy of the services... most of them never come back...