As a lawyer - contact a lawyer.
This is enough money that i would not eat it.
You cannot, in fact, be forced to work for free and forced to eat the cost of fraud.
This kind of case will be taken on contingency
Using someone else’s credit card without permission to obtain thousands of dollars of services is criminal fraud. Ultimately he should be the one forced to make restitution under court order.
>> Why would a bank take my side (a freelancer from another country) instead of his own actual client who never actually requested those services?
It's definitely possible that the author resides in the same country, but he doesn't go into detail in the article.
How is this making sense to you? Is it because in the event of a win the loser would likely pay all legal fees as well? Seems to me that hiring a lawyer in this case only makes sense for the lawyer.
Unrelated, but I think two very likely possibilities here are that the guys business is failing so he decided to chargeback 12.5k worth of work to save money or that he is part of a bigger company that made a similar decision. Look up Saks 5th avenue chargeback situation. They did ~35 million USD in fraudulent chargebacks to make some free money, apparently.
"These kinds of cases will get taken on contingency" means that there are lawyers who will take cases like this for no up-front fee, but rather a percentage of the winnings.
Expensive lawyers charge $400+ per hour. There are all kinds of lawyers. The lawyer you e.g. use to sue your ex-landlord over a security deposit does not take a $10k retainer. The lawyer who manages the warrants and reps process for your M&A deal does.
In general, Non-US is not as “friendly” to this kind of game as the US
1) Draft unfair contract / agreement. Remember to include arbitration clauses.
2) If you want to work on our platform, you gotta sign the contract
3) Sucks to be you
I'm not pretending a small-time freelancer from the other side of the planet has any hope of prevailing against Upwork in court.
In almost all cases you would succeed in getting a judgement for the value of the work you did. You may not be able to successfully enforce it against folks.
Arbitration is secret, and arbitrators are chosen by the corporation, so I'm very curious how you could prove this not to be true.
The same thing happens in almost all adr, like mediation, for the same reason. It is also why you talking to your psychiatrist is confidential.
The second is rarely true. I’m really unsure of your info source here. Here are the standard JAMS rules: https://www.jamsadr.com/rules-comprehensive-arbitration/#Rul...
They are not chosen by the corporation. This is also deliberate. Courts will invalidate sham proceedings, so usually is is either agreement of the parties, or the plaintiff chooses
What percent of sham arbitration proceedings do you think courts catch? Oh wait. That is secret too.
There's a reason that courts default to non-secret. It's so that we can collectively judge whether they are being fair.
What precisely is your data source for this nonsense?
You can easilly be tricked into thinking you have to work for free. But you'll find many courts have laws againist it. Some countries literally have a mechanism for voiding "unfair contracts" and many clauses in unfair contracts aren't actually valid. Just because it's in a contract doesn't mean it's valid. For example, my rental contract says I am not allowed to have pets. The German courts have said that clause is not valid. People keep it in their contracts to stop people who don't know their rights getting pets. While people such as myself get pets, there are 4-6 dogs in my building.
The US for example has also voided debt that was linked to people's future earnings because it would result in them working for free and that would be slavery.