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Review 12/3/2010
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I have played the role of both tutor and student with this website. I have been a member for close to eight months. Here is my honest and factual assessment of this company.
I am actually surprised that there have been no other reports or claims made against this company. If you look the name of the website Studentoffortune, you would come across many many review sites and forums, wherein people express their opinions about the company. I would completely agree with these people. I will list the reasons why as well.
SCAMS- yes, there are numerous scams that occur on this website every single day. The way the company has their website built makes it impossible (yes, impossible) to control scamming people. In a couple days, a "tutor" can steal anywhere from $5 to $100 without doing an ounce of real work. Yes, student of fortune eventually takes action when enough people have complained. If the culprit is caught on time, the only damages he suffers is being locked from his account. Now I cant tell you if the money eventually get refunded to the student or not. If not, than the company is committing a crime. Unfortunately scammers are smarter than this. The amount they steal can be transferred to second and third accounts to secure that money. From there, they simply have to withdrawal that money to their paypal account. This is easy because anyone out there can create multiple accounts.
LACK OF REGULATION- This is a smaller reason, but important nonetheless. Simply put: student of fortune refuses to interfere with disputes between tutors and student (they told me this directly). This is bad because as a tutor I was cheated by a student. The student needed help with an assignment and was willing to pay. I helped student helped with excellent work and received payment. Then the student turned around and demanded a refund otherwise he would give me a poor rating. Tutors are given ratings that let students know that they are legitimate. This hurt me and my business because my rating dropped almost a full letter grade. Unfortunately student of fortune wasn't going to help me with this. This expressly states that student of fortune does not care about its customers, they care about the money.
Go ahead and sign up for an account and give it a try. You will soon see the fallacies of the company.
It's obvious on what the company needs to do in order to eliminate these problems. They need better security and they need to be more proactive to their customers. If they can't do this, then they shouldn't even be in business.
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Business's response - by Sean M.on 12/7/2010
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My name is Sean McCleese and I'm the founder of Student of Fortune. I would like to address all the issues raised by this user's complaint, one by one. If anyone else has any questions or wants to talk to me personally about any issues they have having at the site, they can reach me at founder@studentoffortune.com. I've tried to contact Eric via this website as well through other means but I've had no success in that arena.
We take a really proactive approach to dealing with users trying to scam other users on our site. Users are not permitted to open multiple accounts and transfer money between them -- that alone will result in account closure, much less the other activities Eric is bringing up. We work very very hard every single day to ferret out and remove users who are trying to abuse other students on the site.
In fact, I invite you to go look online for complaints about Student of Fortune. You'll find, overwhelmingly, that they are about us removing a user from the site after they've attempted to defraud someone and then they are complaining about it. While I'm not trying to say that Eric's issues are unfounded, I will say that there is a long and established public record of us taking fraud seriously and holding accountable those who are responsible for it.
Secondly, Student of Fortune is a tutoring community. By definition we cannot decide what makes a tutorial "good" or "bad". As a result, it's very hard for us to deal with complaints between users unless it's a case of clear-cut fraud. I'd like to note that this is very standard practice for almost all online merchants.
I do agree with Eric's suggestion that you sign up for Student of Fortune to see what you think. You can even message any one of our users on Student of Fortune to see what they think -- many of them have legitimately earned more than $80,000 in a year on our site. And, again, if you ever have any problems on the site we will work our very hardest to fix it.
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