That was my first reaction as well but I can't imagine all the potential fraud that takes place in these marketplace. As the market-maker, you are facilitating

That was my first reaction as well but I can't imagine all the potential fraud that takes place in these marketplace. As the market-maker, you are facilitating payments that are many multiples of the actual revenue, let along profit, you're bringing in. I'd guess that even small amounts of fraud that need to be eaten can be rather devastating. However, this is just an awful situation to be in for the contractor. It's rather difficult to have any reaction other than "Upwork needs to eat this" unless this type of thing is so common that it could have a serious impact on Upwork's viability. I remember listing an somewhat odd item on Reverb, a marketplace that facilitates buying and selling music equipment, and waiting months on a buyer only to have the only buyer being someone in a foreign country that was asking me to send the package to a "relative in Texas", who would then forward it to him. Since sending it to Texas was technically covered under Reverb's seller fraud protection policy because it was in the U.S., I made sure to dot my "i's" with Reverb on it and ensured I was protected. I never heard anything else after the transaction so hopefully everything was on the up, but from that experience, I learned that these marketplace protections do require marketplace participants follow very specific guidelines and the person dealing with this Upwork issue did not follow those guidelines.