Here’s everything about Latium being safe to use:
The safety of Latium largely depends on how you go about using the site.
Any freelance platform comes with the risk of scams and disagreements on work completion.
Latium adds to that by offering cryptocurrency payment options.
This creates more total risk, but they are manageable, and you can stay safe.
So if you want to learn all about how safe it is to use Latium, then this article is for you.
Keep reading!
What Is Latium?
In case you aren’t deeply familiar with it, latium.org is a website that serves as a freelancing brokerage platform.
A lot like Fiverr, it’s a place where freelancers and people who need freelancers can find each other.
You can post jobs on the site to find people who can complete them, or you can look for work on the site and complete it in order to get paid.
What makes Latium different from a lot of other platforms is that it supports cryptocurrency payments.
You can pay or receive payments directly in cryptocurrency coins instead of standard currencies.
While crypto options are available, Latium also supports payments in USD.
How Does Latium Work? (3 Points)
To really understand the risks of Latium, it helps to think about the key ways that the site and services function.
Those can be broken into three parts.
You can hire users to do jobs. You can accept jobs from users.
Either way you go about it, payment processing is important.
So, we’ll look at the mechanics of hiring, taking jobs, and payment processing on Latium.
#1 Hire Jobs
Here’s an easy place to start.
Let’s say you want a logo for your business.
You need someone with the right set of artistic skills to make it, so you go onto a freelance site like Latium to find a person who can do the work.
How do you go about it?
You basically have two options.
The first is posting a job.
You create a listing on the site, and freelancers can browse it and see what you need.
The other option is to browse freelancer profiles and send direct messages to them to try to initiate the project.
Ultimately, if you’re going to use the site to complete the transaction, then you have to create a job listing.
That’s how the site confirms that you are capable of making payments.
But, regardless of how you go about this, you can see that an exchange of information takes place.
We’ll get into the risks associated with this a little later, but controlling that information is important to your safety.
#2 Take on Jobs
If you are a freelancer looking for work on Latium, then the process is inverted.
You can browse jobs and place bids on them.
If a bid is accepted, then you can do the job and get paid.
It is also possible for people to contact you directly for work. They have to create the job, but it doesn’t have to go through a public posting process.
In this way, the process is simplified, but once again, some level of contact information is necessary.
So, no matter which side of this equation pertains to your use of the site, you want to think about information security.
#3 Payment Processing
Payment processing is essentially the same whether you are hiring or working on Latium.
The site processes payments. Those payments can be made in USD or cryptocurrency, and they provide very different experiences.
To make a payment in USD, you can link a card or bank account to upload money to the site.
It works like any other digital transaction.
Likewise, to receive this payment, you have to link a card or account that can take the payment.
For cryptocurrency, things are different.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t function in the same way as USD transactions.
Instead, you need a crypto wallet that can handle the exchange.
Latium allows you to use your own wallet, or you can use the built-in system to process cryptocurrency exchanges.
Even if you use the built-in Latium system, if you are going to upload cryptocurrency to make a payment or take a crypto payment from Latium, you need a crypto wallet.
Rather than flood you with too much information, you can learn more about crypto wallets here.
What Are the Risks of Doing Business on Latium.org? (4 Dangers)
Ok.
You have the gist of how Latium works.
That all makes sense.
But, is the site safe?
Ultimately, that depends on how you use it.
There are dangers related to using the internet in general.
There are additional risks that come up with freelancer brokerage platforms.
And, Latium itself introduces risks that you should understand.
We’ll go over the primary risks together and how they work.
That way, you can see how your choices impact your safety when you use the site.
More importantly, you can decide for yourself how safe Latium is or isn’t.
#1 Scams
With any freelancing website, you have to watch out for scams.
These can go in either direction.
Freelancers can scam job posters, and job posters can scam freelancers.
By and large, there are two common scams.
The impossible job poster will go through the normal channels to post a job on the site.
You bid on it, and they accept you.
You do the work, and then they never approve the work.
You’re out of time, and you don’t get paid.
Latium does offer resources to help with this.
Primarily, they provide mediation and arbitration so that you and the job poster can come to an agreement.
This doesn’t provide perfect protection against scams, and Latium does not guarantee payment.
So, that’s worth considering.
The other scam is the same idea in the other direction.
You post a job and find a freelancer.
They mark the job as completed either without doing the job or doing an unacceptably poor job.
They get automatic payment, and you didn’t get your job completed.
Again, arbitration and mediation services are there, but there are no guarantees.
In either case, your best defense is to stick with highly rated job posters or freelancers.
These are people (or groups) who have worked on the site a lot to great success.
The odds of them running a scam are a lot lower.
#2 Identity Theft
You saw earlier that some amount of communication exists on Latium.
Now, you can use the site without providing a lot of personal information to other users on the site, and that is by design.
Latium makes money by bringing job posters and freelancers together.
If you can communicate and work together without the site, they lose money.
So, you very much can maintain a fair amount of anonymity while using the site.
But, direct communication is possible.
If you give up personal information, it can potentially be used for identity theft.
So, steering into anonymity is your best defense.
#3 Crypto Theft
Latium allows users to send and receive money entirely through cryptocurrency.
That introduces an entirely new wrinkle to the online freelancer game.
A big issue with cryptocurrencies is theft.
The thing about how cryptocurrencies work is that when someone steals it, it’s theirs.
Crypto is like cash in this regard.
If you have cash in your wallet and someone takes it, you probably aren’t getting it back.
So, if you’re doing cryptocurrency exchanges with Latium, then you need good personal crypto security.
That’s where wallets come into play, but improperly secured wallets get robbed a lot.
You need to take the time to learn about this stuff and have a good security plan before you commit to crypto exchanges.
Fortunately, Latium does allow you to work in old-fashioned USD exchanges.
#4 Crypto Volatility
Crypto introduces another challenge, and this one is a lot tougher to overcome.
Cryptocurrencies tend to be volatile.
The value of a coin today might not be the same tomorrow.
They can balloon and collapse in very short order, and it can make Latium more complicated.
If you agree to do a job for a certain value, the coin might rapidly depreciate once you’re done.
So, even though everyone kept up their part of the bargain, you’re taking a financial hit just because of how volatile cryptocurrencies are.
It goes in the other direction too.
Once you pay for a job with crypto coins, they might gain a ton of value very quickly.
You’ve suddenly overpaid for the job, and you’re out that potential money.
There is no simple solution.
If you’re going to perform these transactions with cryptocurrencies, then you are taking on the risk of volatility.
As long as you know that going in, then you are making an informed decision.
How Can You Resolve Problems on Latium? (2 Ways)
You know what to look out for when you use Latium, but what do you do when a problem arises?
There are a few things you can try.
#1 Use Provided Resources
Latium has a knowledge base that helps users understand how everything works.
They even have sections that talk about common scams and how to spot and avoid them.
This knowledge is made available for a reason.
Users have run into these problems before.
You can learn from their mistakes in order to have a better experience.
If you take full advantage of these resources, Latium is a much safer platform.
As they say, knowledge is power.
#2 Contact Support
If you run into trouble despite your best efforts, Latium has active support resources.
These resources can help you deal with technical or logistical issues related to the website.
They also involve some of the personnel resources mentioned earlier, namely arbitration and mediation.
Whether you are running into issues related to scamming, disagreements with other users, or anything else, the existence of Latium’s active support network does offer help, and it ultimately makes the site a bit safer.
