Frankly, I don't have too much to offer with regard to the support issues. I only helped my GF with it, and it was a while ago. If it improved in the meantime and my comments are no longer representative, I'm really sorry. I should have made that clearer.

However, as for the other matters:

> we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments.

Actually, you don't have them by default :-). By your own admitting:

> We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them.

My (admittedly foggy, please correct me if I'm wrong) memory tells me that RAC had escrows by default, i.e. the buyer had to place the money in RAC's escrow before the coder could start work. I distinctly remember that RAC's seller instructions clearly said you should not start coding before the project is awarded to you, because there is no way to be sure the buyer actually has the money to pay you. When the project was awarded, the money was placed in escrow. I actually had a dispute settled over this matter: my client had simply vanished. I waited for two weeks before telling him I'd get the project into arbitration if I don't receive feedback, and waited another three before getting it into arbitration. The RAC arbitrator decided that if he failed to respond within some reasonable period (a couple of weeks, again), I'd get the money, because the deliverable I had submitted was indeed in accordance with what had been agreed.

Freelancer.com doesn't force buyers to do that, giving rise to the following phenomenon: a scammer opens an account -- with zero reviews but a verified payment method -- and posts a job ad. It's well-paid for something otherwise reasonably simple, like some content writing, but the job has to be done quickly and the buyer claims he can't offer a milestone payment that quickly -- he doesn't have the money on hand, bank transfer takes time (he usually lists his country to be something like Zambia or Congo, where it's probably fairly safe to assume that banks don't go too smoothly with all the firing in the street and whatnot). Since the pay is higher than average, a lot of freelancers are happy to do it. Needless to say, they never get their money.

I'm sorry to say, but when this happened, your large support team did absolutely nothing. They simply reminded her that she should ask for a milestone payment, which a lot of buyers actually don't want to do for credible, or at the very least legitimate reasons. If you don't want to force people into escrowing, you should be able to deal with cases like these.

This wasn't an isolated incident because the same type of job ad appeared several times in the following weeks. We actually tried to warn other freelancers about it and we found at least another dozen people got the same treatment, quite possibly from the same guy who was opening different accounts, and from the same support team.

Edit: Oh yes, rounding of fees.

This page: http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ claims that, for a free membership plan, Freelancer.com gets 10% of what gets paid to a freelancer, or 5 USD, whichever is greater. Fair enough.

But if I try to bid for 100 USD that gets paid to me, the bid now gets to 111.11 USD, which looks an awful lot closer to 11%.

I initially assumed this had something to do with including the 3% amount that the employer is charged for the posting, too, but it doesn't add up. I never really bothered understanding how it goes; as I mentioned in my other post, I haven't done freelance work on what is today Freelancer.com since the days it was still called Rent a Coder. But in the best case, this is poorly documented. I, for one, can't make sense of it, and I'm probably better at doing math than most freelancers who do content "writing" or social media promotion on your website.

Even later edit: just to be clear, I'm not trying to scold your business model, nor your efforts as a company. If your current model works for you, then it's awesome. Matters of finance and corporate politics are beyond either my possibilities and my wish to comprehend. Freelancer.com isn't doing bad financially (though, since I'm not living off its dividends, that's irrelevant to me) so I presume there are people for whom it makes world a better place. For me, it doesn't.