I and several others have recently had nightmarish experiences with Synapseindia, which we hired through Elance. In less than one day, I have discovered five others with nearly identical experiences to mine who are willing to do whatever it takes to bring this situation to light. We feel Elance has facilitated fraud pertaining to this service provider and we are paying serious price for it. Collectively, we can prove the following:

--Elance facilitated fraud by allowing Synapseindia to manipulate its customer feedback system. Of 207 recent clients and 47 reviews, only ONE is negative about this company. However, three out of the 6 people involved in this complaint, including myself, were not allowed to leave feedback about this company when we attempted to do so, even though we were well within the 60-day timeframe required by Elance. In each case, it was discovered that Synapseindia falsely changed the completion date for each project to prevent feedback. I managed to have Elance correct this mistake only after innumerable phone calls and emails. Further, out of 10 people I contacted, not one was actually satisfied with their service. Nine of these people have agreed to allow their names be used in this complaint.

--Elance allowed Synapseindia to mispresent its technical skills. All of us can clearly prove that Synapseindia was lacking the ability to complete our projects, depsite the fact that they claimed expertise and had more high scores on more skills tests than virtually any other Elance service provider. Furthermore, this company continually made innumerable, blatant mistakes and attempted to charge each of us to correct to them.

Elance claims it has a neutral, non-responsible role in connecting employers with service providers. The structure of their service, however, is far from neutral. I and 3 others of the people I spoke with are paying serious financial consequences for our decisions to use this service. If you choose to use them anyway, be very careful!