Black List of Buyers

Yup...here is the project id: 1324995

and his name is Kurth Cambridge

IMHO buyer can change's their name, or make a new account after their banned,. so it's useless.

people become dishonest,  buyers can get a bunch of briliant idea from provider with no need to pay anything, and get job done for free,.. even we put a watermark on every single pictures. they can used it.

maybe, if somebody want to be come a buyer,. they need to supply the company/personal name and address, so we can see who's the buyer is.that probely can minimize the problems.

i'm prefered before buyer want to put a project they must put a fix rate money to odesk first,  every provider need to post the project to public, so everyone can see the work's. and provider can see who's win the project.

correct me if i'm wrong.

It's not entirely an excercise in futility. If the buyer already has an OVPM, prior history of jobs & payments, as well as positive feedback, he loses all of those (even if those were only "setups"). Starting again from scratch without all that prior history (if he had any) would make serious providers think more carefully before applying to his so-called "jobs."

It may not stop these unscrupulous members completely, but at the very least I'd certainly want to see them go through hoops again before they're able to even try and scam legit providers once more. A blacklist, as suggested by the thread-starter, does have its merits insofar as warning the provider community of these intellectual property thieves.

Of course, I'm sure we're all hoping for something that could serve as a more effective deterrent, as well as a proactive mechanism for weeding out undesirables from both the provider & buyer communities. Until then, we'll all have to keep the faith in the system.

absolutly right, need to keep the faith,
and it's need more times.
just hoping Odesk can provided the good solution in their system.

did anybody here have an experiences with http://99designs.com?

That providers don't think to scan the forums before they apply for jobs. More and more scammers are being called out here (which I personally think is a good thing). It would have prevented something like this thread and article.

 Doreen

I think all providers should be careful when giving out free work samples in the hopes of landing a job. As has been suggested above, a short-term, paid assignment on a trial basis would be a better approach. Plus, with an assignment, both parties are able to leave feedback. 

Yang

oDesk

watermark your samples as "Sample Only" or whatever you can come up with, for it to become unusable.

Regards

A watermark won't help if they are taking those samples to another provider anyway.

And I agree that, if somebody is out to scam us, they would go to that extent. Unfortunately, I could only try to protect myself from my end. If another provider decided it's ethical for them to remove that type of watermarking, that is really up to them.

In the end we can only protect ourselves, each and everyone of us must decide whether we will get scammed or not.