Because there might have been a falsehood involved along the lines of, "this is what we normally pay for this kind of work" when that's not true at all. A cont

Because there might have been a falsehood involved along the lines of, "this is what we normally pay for this kind of work" when that's not true at all. A contract based on lies is fraud. The information asymytry here is huge. It's worse than a sleazy car salesman showing a customer a doctored blue-book to inflate the price of an old junker.