Good morning all,
I am a Private Investigator and have been trading for over 20 years. i signed up to bark to evaluate the service. Within a few hours I started getting lead enquiries. However, the names on the enquiries are somewhat suspicious. For example:
Sax
Oxy
Park
I think you get the picture. Clearly these are false enquiries, designed to lure the account holder into spending money on "credits" in order to be able to respond. Having been in this business for so many years, I obviously see a trend in requires. However, via bark, I receive enquires, from people supposedly based in England at times such as:
01.00
03.00
04.00 etc. This is on a DAILY basis!! Now, either the nation has taken to night work with a passion or once again, these enquiries are wholly false. I am definitely leaning towards the latter.
Hi Timothy,
My name is Jamie and I manage the Customer Support team here at Bark.com.
I wanted to address some of the issues you’ve raised, as it’s disappointing to hear your feedback when we have 1000s of professionals securing new business every single day on our platform.
So you’re aware, every Bark (request) goes through a thorough screening process before its released - and we only ever accept a request on the basis we’re 100% satisfied it is genuine. We always aim to get the client between 2 and 5 responses and on average see 2 responses per Bark. Response rates are watched very closely by our Marketing department for two main reasons:
We do not want to overwhelm the client.
We want Sellers to secure business and continue using us - we do not have a subscription, sign up fee or contract and operate on a pay per introduction basis - meaning its in our interest to keep competition levels low.
Here are just some of the ways that we screen our leads:
When a request is placed we know its origin and which campaign it has come through.
We know if the client has used our services before and what the outcome was.
We check their IP address against the place they are requesting the services. We also have anything outside the UK flagged to us.
Verifying the phone number - we work with a 3rd party company that check the number has been connected to a network within the last 3 hours.
Verifying the email address - when a request is placed we send the client a welcome email - if this email is not delivered (e.g. bounces back) then we do not release the Bark.
Ensuring Adequate detail is provided - If not all the questions are answered or we feel the description is too vague then we manually follow up with the client.
With some sensitive categories we ensure they’re all manually checked before release.
If it does come to light that something has slipped through the net then we close the request and re-credit those that have responded.
Looking in to your account specifically:
We did send emails from a Oxy and a Sax. There were no enquiries from anyone called Park.
We alerted you to 244 jobs between 15/6 and 29/8. You were only charged for the ones you responded to.
65 of the 244 jobs did arrive between midnight and 0600. Reasons for this will include:
The nature of the work, often involving suspected cheating spouses, may become apparent late at night
In a number of our sensitive categories an additional human layer of checks is built in to ensure quality. This may mean that the time the request is placed, and the time it’s released are slightly apart
The most common times for job to arrive was between 2200 and midnight.
The accusations that our leads are false is totally baseless and we can see you have actually been hired and have a 5 star review from one of our clients.
We’ll happily speak to any Seller who has concerns about any enquiry and we can be contacted at our London office on team (at) bark (dot) com or via 02036970237 should you or anybody else have any questions for us.
Kindest regards,
Jamie
The Bark Team
Phone: +4420 3697 0237
