24 Nov 2025 · 7 min
John Jonas explains why you shouldn't prepay Filipino online specialists. Scammers steal test tasks, demand upfront fees, then vanish. Require watermarked deliverables, pay only after work is done, and use weekly payments for the first months to verify someone is real.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. This is episode 430, do not prepay for Work. So when I sent this out to my newsletter, it didn't get the best response rate or the best open rate. And maybe the subject line is not that great, maybe this isn't that interesting, or maybe you just don't need to listen to a podcast about Do Not Prepay for work when the title is Don't Prepay for Work. Maybe you already get it Don't Prepay for Work. But I. I think this is important enough to point out a number of things that I want to talk about today. So there's a couple things going on in prepayments. So number one, and this is a different situation, but it's still super related, when someone in the Philippines gets asked to do a job like a test task or a trial or a probationary period or something, they're very worried about getting scammed. So that's the first thing to keep in mind with all of this. Because scams where you get someone to do a bunch of work under the pretense of this is a test task or this is a trial or there's a probationary period and you get them to do the work and then you don't pay them are very well or very highly talked about. In the Philippines, it happens on online jobs. It happens less because we require employers to pay. And typically this getting people to do work for free happens on platforms where it's free to hire someone. You get them to do the work, you don't pay them. So that would be. Well, I'm not gonna name platforms, but it happens less on onlinejobs ph than other platforms, which is very common, but it still happens on online jobs. And so that's something to be aware of, that this is common in the Philippines culture of being very leery of being asked to do work and not getting paid for it. So on the other side of it, someone in the Philippines should not be asking to get prepaid for work that they're doing. And to me, this is a huge red flag. Almost every single time I've ever seen someone ask for money up front, whether it be can you prepay me? Or my laptop is broken, or I have an electricity problem, can you pay my utilities or whatever it is, if they're asking for money before they've worked, it's like almost every single time it's a scam. Now, I've been doing this since 2005. That makes almost 20 years now. And I've seen this a dozen times, which time tells you how seldom this is happening, but it's definitely still happening. So I got this email from an employer recently. He says, I attempted to hire someone from your company, and the person asked for a favor to be paid before he started. Then he disappeared on me. Well, yeah, getting paid first, that's a problem. I have been told that because we had one phone call to discuss the job, he deserves to keep the payment, even though I waited a month for him and had to hire someone else. Is this correct? No, that is not correct. That guy is scamming you, and that is super sucky. He doesn't deserve to keep the money. He didn't do any work. Do not prepay for work. Okay, so here's another experience that I had recently where I had asked this guy to do some design work for me. I told him I would pay him this much for each design. Now, he was really scared about getting. Getting scammed about him doing the designs and me taking the designs and not paying him for it, which I get. He could, could have and should have just done the designs and watermarked them so that I couldn't use them until I paid him for them. Then he sends me the designs. That's the correct way to do design work. Instead, he says, hey, okay, I did your work. Pay me. And I was like, wait a minute, did I miss an email from him? And so I said, hey, I didn't see anything. And he responds and says, yeah, I sent you the designs. Pay me. I go back and look, no, wait a minute. No, you didn't. And so I responded to him and said, hey, are you serious? You're trying to scam me right now? You didn't send me anything. I'm not going to pay you. You. Yes, I did pay me. So I finally responded to him and said, hey, I own onlinejobs.ph, and you're trying to scam me. Do you realize the repercussions of what you're doing right now? So he sends an email to our support team, even though I had emailed him from johnnlinejobs.ph, he sends an email to support saying, hey, you have this guy impersonating online jobs. And just so you know, here's what's going on. And so, of course, I get that email forwarded to me from our support team, and I forwarded it to him, and he starts backpedaling immediately. I'm so sorry. I'm so Sorry, I'll do the work. And I was like, well, you know what, it's too late. I'm leaving you a review. I'm leaving you a bad review because you're asking to get prepaid for stuff that you didn't do and you're lying to me and that's super sucky, right? And my guess is had I paid him, he probably would have done the work because he thought I was trying to scam him by getting him to do work ahead of time without paying, right? So there's this circle going on here when you're asking for real work to get done as a trial or as a test. But I wasn't asking for a trial or a test, I was asking for real work. He didn't want to get scammed. So in this situation, obviously I didn't prepay him for the work because I didn't want to get scammed. So in all of this, this has been my solution to this problem over the years. And the solution actually works out really, really well for a lot of reasons. When I hire someone, I tell them at least. So for a full time position, well, for part time work for graphic design, he should have done the work and sent me a watermark. He should have done one thing and sent me a watermarked image so I couldn't steal his work and not pay him. And he should have done little work and sent it to me watermarked so that he could. Then I could say, okay, here's your money, now do more. Because I wanted 10 designs done. That's an easy solution to this freelance work, right? But when you hire someone on a more permanent basis, salaried or maybe even hourly, what my solution is, hey, I'm going to pay you once a week for the first couple months just so you know I'm real, that I'm going to pay you legitimately, that you're not, that I'm not going to steal from you, I'm not going to scam you, I'm not going to, I'm not going to try and get you to do work without me paying you. Now this may work for you depending on your company. If you have a, if your website's legitimate, if you have a reputation, obviously I have people in the Philippines that I can say, hey, go talk to these people, you're gonna get paid. If you don't, it might be a problem. It's probably not gonna be a problem for you because people in the Philippines really just want the work. And the point of this podcast was to tell you, do not prepay for work. Not to warn you that you have to pay people in order to get them to work, because that's usually not the case. That happened to me once. But the reality is, anytime someone asks for a salary advance, a new laptop, money to get paid before their sister, medical bills, their Internet bills, whatever it is, if it's the beginning of the relationship, if they're just starting working for you, do not prepay. Now, an add on to that is there is a caveat. After someone has worked for you for a while, then, yep, we prepay for work all the time. Not that we're prepaying, but we give salary advances. Oh, yeah, don't give a salary advance in the beginning either. We give salary advances all the time now. When people are in a hard spot, they need money right now. And yep, I trust you. And you've been working for me for six months. You've been working me for 12 years. Yep, I'm going to give you a salary advance. Yes, I will do that. But that is after you trust someone, not before. Don't prepay for work.
