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The one who made the order ("Robin") has not paid the contractor. This makes it possible for the contractor to claim that "Robin" owns him the money. "Robin" i

• CRConrad 5y ago
  > The one who made the order ("Robin") has not paid the contractor. He is not supposed to: he is supposed to pay Upwork. Which he did (only with someone else's credit card); Upwork then paid the contractor. > This makes it possible for the contractor to claim that "Robin" owns him the money. No, the contractor got his money (from Upwork) in the first place; at the moment he is not owed any money. The actual holder of the credit card (not "Robin") then issued a chargeback on the credit card, and the card company apparently took the money back from Upwork. So the one that's out of money at the moment -- and therefore thinks they're owed it back -- is Upwork, nobody else. Being the middle man in these transactions is precisely what Upwork is all about. That's why they put "You're not allowed to start charging the client on your own for a gig begun via Upwork" in their TOS -- which the contractor says he honoured. And he must be telling the truth there: Otherwise the payment wouldn't have gone via Upwork -- which it must have done, or it couldn't have been charged back from them. The whole deal here is that there is not one transaction here, but two: The client pays Upwork; Upwork keeps a cut of that payment; then Upwork pays the rest of it to the contractor. But what do Upwork do for their cut of the original payment? The very least they can do for inserting themselves as a middleman in what would otherwise have been a single transaction between two other parties is that they secure payments due to themselves, don't you think? IOW: The whole Upwork model is based on decoupling the payment for work into two separate transactions. The contractor accepted and obeyed those terms. Therefore, the fraudulent transaction didn't involve the contractor: It was between Upwork and the client. Which of course makes Upwork's current idea of clawing back the money they were defrauded of by "Robin" from the contractor, who was not involved in that fraudulent transaction, (by basically decreeing that any future work he might do via them would be all their cut) ludicrous on the face of it. But that's maybe not even the main point here. The point is: It's Upwork's headache, not the contractor's. That is, in large part, what he lets them take their cut for. He shouldn't have to bother with suing "Robin" -- that's Upwork's job.
  • z3t4 5y ago
    The platform doesn't have any leverage here, they are just a middle man. All the platform can do is to ban the users from their platform. The platform does not own the claim, the contractor owns the claim. The platform is just a pay-gate. "Robin" is of course going to say that he has paid, but there are plenty of proof that it was fraud. So "Robin" will have to pay the contractor. But the platform has no claim on the contractor, so the contractor can take the money from "Alex", then walk away from the platform with 2x the money, or pay the platform in order to not get banned. It could be worse, for example if "Alex" was an random dude with false name it would be impossible to claim the money. But now they've met in person and hopefully the contractor knows his ID and address.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      > The platform doesn't have any leverage here, they are just a middle man. They have all the leverage here, as they are the only party that has any contract with both the other parties. > So "Robin" will have to pay the contractor. No, he will have to pay Upwork! That's whom he signed a deal with! How the fuck can this be so hard to understand?!? > But the platform has no claim on the contractor, Exactly. So why are they trying to impose some bullshit "We're going to keep ALL your future earnings until we get as much as our client bilked us out of" on the contractor? That's the injustice that is the crux of this matter, not this irrelevant "remedy" that you keep blithering about -- which in reality is just a further (huge!) imposition on the only wholly innocent party here, the contractor. > But now they've met in person and hopefully the contractor knows his ID and address. That's wholly, totally, utterly fucking irrelevant. NOT having to use stuff like that to chase after a payment is precisely what the contractor pays Upwork their cut for. At most, as a pure courtesy to Upwork, he could give that info to Upwork for them to use in chasing down "Robin". But: 1) "We met in Zürich" sounds like they quite possibly both travelled there. What use is the address of a hotel where "Robin" stayed a night or two years ago? 2) "His IP"?!? a) Why would he have that? b) What use is an IP address from that hotel, or some Starbucks / daily-rental-office-space in Zürich from years ago? c) Shouldn't Upwork already have all relevant and necessary contact details for their client, "Robin"? I'm sorry: At first I thought you were either trying to make some weird (and bad) joke, or had just suffered some normal misunderstanding of the issues at hand. But as it has become clear that you're just simply refusing to understand what this is all about, I see no use in continuing to try and enlighten you.