So I have a saas startup and due to the shortage of specialists in my home country I had to hire an overseas freelancer via fiverr and he scammed me and disappeared. And yes, I took all the usual precautions before hiring him and now he's banned from fiverr. I generally noticed a pattern with freelancers using pre-composed code/designs..etc then tweak it a bit and sell it as their own work, which could be a huge issue if you build on it.

Then I decided to hire a part time local developer just for the legal protection side. He showed me his previous work and it looks solid but I still don't know if I can trust that he's qualified to do the job, which is something I can check and measure on fiverr from reviews and ratings.

I'm thinking of hiring this dev and hiring someone else on fiverr just to speed things up and have one of them watching over the other one, or maybe this is a bad idea I don't really know. What would you guys do if you were in this situation?