There’s no shortage of people offering love spell on Fiverr, but are they any good? Do any of them work, or is it just another outlet for the fraudsters and scammers who prey on those most in need?
A Divisive History
When Fiverr launched on February 1st 2010, it ushered in a revolution in the purchase and sale of services. The idea that such a diverse range of services could be purchased for such a small sum was divisive to say the least.
Which side of the divide you fell on depended largely on whether you were a buyer or seller. For anyone who wanted cheap logos or translations or drawings done to order, the site was the answer to their prayers.
Service providers were obviously less keen. Being asked to peddle their wares for a paltry $5 a shot was insulting to many. Even more so when Fiverr’s cut was taken into account.
Yet for all the arguments about devaluing work, the site thrived. A host of copycats even sprang up, although none gained quite the same traction as the original.
Quality vs. Quantity
There’s no doubt there are some excellent service providers to be found on Fiverr. There’s also no doubt there is some absolute rubbish on there, and some downright scammers.
This is not surprising. Any large marketplace attracts those out to make a fast buck at the expense of someone else. eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, they’re all a magnet for the unethical and the morally corrupt. Sorting through the junk is part of the package when using an online marketplace.
Love Spells on Fiverr
So what of love spells on Fiverr? Are there any jewels in the rough? Any bargains to be found among the pages of trash? Are there any genuine spell casters there who can fix broken relationships or bring an end to unrequited love?
Based on the number of horror stories I hear from people who come to me desperate for help, I’d hazard a guess that no, there are not. Or at least if there are, they must be so difficult to find as to not be worth it.
Lori wrote to me after having gone through a distressing Fiverr experience, and her story is typical of those I see almost every week. She was in a deep depression after her husband left her.
A Typical Fiverr Love Spell Experience
“We’d been together for nine years,” Lori tells me. “We were looking forward to out ten-year anniversary. At least I was. I thought Jim was too, but apparently not, because the week before, he told me he was moving out.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Jim really stuck the knife in when he told Lori why. “He said he was sleeping with his secretary. His secretary for goodness sake! How clichéd is that? The worst of it was he said it had been going on for more than a year. He said he didn’t love me anymore, that I didn’t make him feel the same way she did so there was no point staying around.”
Lori was devastated. To make matters worse, less than a week later she was diagnosed with a serious illness.
“I was like, is God punishing me for something? I couldn’t understand what I had done to deserve this. In the space of a week my whole life had been tipped upside down.”
Priorities
Her first priority was to get the treatment she needed for her illness. It was expensive and her insurance didn’t cover all of it. “With Jim gone it was already a stretch to pay the rent. When I came out of hospital there was no money left, so I had no choice to but leave our apartment — the place we’d lived happily all our married lives — and get a room in a shared place. I know people live in worse conditions, but it was a shock. And I was getting over treatment that had drained me completely of energy. I curled up in the uncomfortable single bed in the cold, damp room and didn’t want to get up again, ever. I wanted to die there. I wanted for it all to be over.”
Fortunately for Lori she had friends who rallied to help her. “My best friend brought round a heater, and she and some others spent a couple of days tidying the place up, cleaning, brightening it up, making it a bit more homely. They cooked for me, they read to me. They gave me the love that was missing since Jim had gone.”
And where was Jim when all this was going on? “With the secretary I guess,” Lori says. “He never came to visit. My best friend tried to persuade him to come see me but he refused. Maybe he thought if he saw the state I was in, he’d feel guilty, I don’t know.”
Still in Love
On the mend from her illness, and with her accommodation at least livable, Lori’s thoughts were preoccupied with her husband. “My friends were great but they couldn’t be with me all the time. They have lives, husbands, boyfriends, jobs… They’re not my keepers, and I don’t begrudge them for not being around more. So I was on my own a lot in that place. I wasn’t well enough to work, so all I could do was sit around and think about my Jim. He might have been a douche for leaving, but we’d had nearly ten great years together. You don’t just throw that away, right? And I still loved him. Whatever he’d done, the love doesn’t just stop. I wanted him back, and I decided I was going to get him back. It was my mission. It gave me a focus.”
The Money Problem
It didn’t take Lori very long to come to the idea of using a love spell to fix her marriage. “One of my friends had used one. She swore it had worked. The rest of us weren’t convinced, we think she met her boyfriend on Tinder, but whatever. It gave me the idea. So I started reading a lot about love spells. I read so much I kept running down the battery on my phone. I saw things from witch doctors, voodoo experts, wiccan practitioners, all sorts. Most of it sounded like baloney. Some things rang true, and two people stood out so I contacted them to see if they could help. They both said the same things: Yes they could help, but it would cost money.”
And there was the rub. In her bedsit, without her husband’s support, having spent all her savings on life-saving medical treatment, and with a bare-minimum allowance coming in from her employer while she recovered, Lori couldn’t pay these spell casters.
As it turns out, that was just as well. She’s since told me both of the sites she was looking at, and I know they are both very well known scammers who would have stopped at nothing to take her for every cent she had. It was a lucky escape.
Unfortunately she wasn’t as lucky when she discovered Fiverr.
Love Spells For a Fiverr
“Fiverr was a revelation,” Lori says. I didn’t even go there looking for love spells. I wanted someone to make a nice thank you card for my friends because I was in no state to do it. While I was there it put up a list of other services I might be interested in. I guess they must track what other websites you visit or something, because there were ads for love spells on the list. I couldn’t believe it. Spells for five bucks. Even five dollars was a stretch. I’d spent the few dollars I’d managed to scrape together on the thank you card. But this was my chance to get Jim back, so I was sure as hell going to find the money from somewhere. I made a decision: I would spend my rent money on some spells. If they worked and Jim came back, it wouldn’t matter that the rent wasn’t paid because he would take care of me.”
And if they didn’t work?
“I didn’t want to think about that,” Lori says. “And that was my biggest mistake of all.”
The First Spell
“I chose a gig with loads of 5-star reviews. I thought that with all that good feedback I couldn’t go wrong. I was wrong. I paid my five dollars, explained the situation, and waited.”
Lori told me she got an email back within a few hours saying her spell had been cast. “But the woman said that there’d been a problem. She said the secretary had used black magic to lure Jim away from me. She said it was very powerful magic but that she would be able to cleanse it. It would take a lot of work, so I’d have to order her super deluxe extra powerful spell. That’s not what it was called by the way, I can’t remember the actual name, but it was something like that.”
Anyone who’s been through this kind of process will recognize the scam straight away, but did Lori?
“I wasn’t sure,” she says. “The thing about black magic sounded true. It would explain why Jim had gone when I thought we were happy. But I went back and re-read what I had written to this woman when I bought her gig and I noticed that I hadn’t said anything about Jim having slept with the woman for more than a year. And I re-read her reply and she said the reason he had left out of the blue was this black magic. That’s when I knew she was lying. It was out of the blue for me, but not for him. She didn’t know it had been going on for a year so she must have been lying.”
Not Put Off
Lori declined the chance to spend more money she didn’t have, and looked elsewhere. She wasn’t put off by one bad experience, she was determined to get Jim back and was convinced a love spell was still the best way.
“The next one I tried looked promising, but when I went into the detail there wasn’t anything useful for $5. That just bought a ‘reading’, which would tell me about the situation as it was now. I knew about the situation now, I needed it fixed. That would need an upgrade, and it was more money than I had.”
There were several gigs like that. But eventually Lori found a genuine-looking caster with good reviews who said he could cast a spell for $5.
“I booked him, and I waited. He told me he cast the spell and, amazingly, he didn’t ask for any more money afterwards. I thought this was it. This was going to work. It was just a matter of time now.”
Lori waited and waited. She went back to hospital for another round of treatment. “When they were ready to let me go home I was sure Jim would be there to collect me. In my mind the spell had worked, he’d seen the error of his ways, seen how much he loved me, and was going to come and save me.”
But Jim wasn’t there. He didn’t come back. He didn’t so much a send a card. Lori’s friend took her back to the cold, damp bedsit, and though she did her best, eventually she had to leave her there on her own.
Deep Depression
“That’s when the deepest, darkest depression hit me,” Lori recalls. “I was already feeling low after the treatment, and there on my own, after having got my hopes up, I was devastated. It was worse than the day he had left me. I felt helpless, desperate. I felt like I was suffocating in my own sorrow. I truly wanted to die, and if I had had more strength I believe I would have ended my own life at that point.”
Did she consider Fiverr again? “No. I was done with that. I couldn’t handle any more false hope. And anyway, my non-payment of the rent had caught up with me. My landlord told me I had three days to leave, no excuses.”
Slow Recovery
With Lori about to be made homeless, how did she cope? “My friend took me in,” she says. “I called her to ask if I could borrow the rent money. She came back, saw the state I was in, and said she wasn’t leaving me alone. She bundled me into her car and took me back to her place. I didn’t want to be a burden — she has kids and their house is already too small for them — but she wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I was in no state to fight anyway.”
It took Lori a couple of months to crawl out of the deepest depths of her despair and become at least semi-functional again. Her friend’s help and love was vital to the process.
“The kids helped too,” Lori says. “They were so full of energy and life and some of that rubbed off on me I think.”
So was that when she decided to try a love spell again?
“No. That was my friend’s idea. One night she said she needed to talk to me about something. She said that when I had first come to her, when I was at my lowest point and was drugged up after the treatment, that she had seen my phone had kept buzzing with messages. Thinking it might be something urgent, she had taken a peek.”
The Shocking Return of Fiverr
What Lori’s friend saw shocked her. It wasn’t a message from Jim asking for forgiveness. It wasn’t a text from her work asking how she was. So what was it?
“Messages from the Fiverr gig guy,” Lori says. “He kept sending messages saying he’d got a new spell that could definitely help, but I had to buy it soon or it would be too late and I’d never get Jim back.”
Her friend didn’t tell her about the messages until much later, when she thought she could handle it. “She knew I’d cave and send the guy money, and she also knew he was scamming me. But there was one good thing about those messages: they made my friend start to look at love spells, and that’s how she found your site, Joshua.”
The Rest is History
Lori’s friend gently persuaded her to give my spell a try. The fact it was free was a help, but Lori was more concerned with being let down again, as she told me at the time. But with nothing else to look forward to, she finally decided to give it a go.
I’m delighted to report that the spell worked very well, that Jim did come back, and that he and Lori are back living together in a new rental apartment. They recently celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary. Lori isn’t out of the woods yet with her illness, but she is responding well to treatment, and having Jim by her side is a huge help. “Oh sure,” she says. “The treatment sucks, but with Jim I feel I can take on anything.”
Is It All Worth It?
In the end, Lori only lost a few dollars to the Fiverr spell casters, so was it worth the try?
“Absolutely not,” she says. “No way. If I’d had more money, I would have given it to them and lost that too. And anyway, it wasn’t even about the money. It was the false hope. False hope at a moment I most needed real hope and real help. For that I can never forgive them.”
Lori admits there could be genuine spell casters somewhere on Fiverr, but she believes that doesn’t make it worth the effort of trying to find them. “How many scammers and time wasters do you have to go through to find a good one, if a good one even exists?” she says. “Every time you send a scammer money you’re helping them get to the top of the page on Fiverr so they can take advantage of more vulnerable people. And you’re wasting time and energy and hope. No, I wouldn’t go near the place again. The whole experience has put me off for life. I wouldn’t even go back there for another thank you card.”
What About The Reviews?
One thing puzzled Lori, long after her Fiverr experience. She asked me about it when I contacted her for this post. “Yeah, the reviews. I don’t get how they all have these great reviews? That’s what made me think their spells would really work.”
It’s a good point. What’s up with the star ratings on Fiverr? Was she alone in having a bad experience? After all, the stars would suggest otherwise.
The truth is, sadly, all too predictable. Star rating on Fiverr, like star ratings on any website, can be bought for money. There are forums and chat rooms and so-called dark markets where the scammers can buy star ratings for their gigs, and for surprisingly little cash.
A simple Google search reveals no shortage of ‘services’ like this one where reviews and star ratings can be bought for any Fiverr gig.
Fiverr do police their reviews, and every now and then they take down gigs with paid (or exchanged) reviews. But the scammers just set up a new account or new gig. They can even buy pre-made Fiverr accounts with reviews already in place.
Do Your Own Research
As I said at the beginning, there are undoubtedly some good service providers on Fiverr. Maybe that extends to love spell services, maybe not, I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is this:
1) Anyone can set up a Fiverr gig, buy themselves some 5-star ratings cheaply, and make it look like they are a world-class spell caster and start scamming people.
2) Every week I see stories like Lori’s. People come to me desperate for help after having been scammed on Fiverr (and other sites). Sometimes they’ve only lost $5 and a bit of pride, but usually they’ve lost hundreds of dollars, and worse, they’ve lost hope.
Given these facts, I’d have to urge anyone thinking of buying a love spell — or any other service — from Fiverr, to do their own research and make sure they understand the risks.