Companies / people
- saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible,
- starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine),
- blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables,
- working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time,
- disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not)
- making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true
and other types of scamming.
Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that.
There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point.
I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer.
What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.