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Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the solution for this Robin character to provide another card, one that this person actually owns, and provide 12,500 from that card directly? And if Robin doesn't want to pay, to start legal proceedings toward recovering the funds from Robin?

How is the bank or Upwork the bad guy here when it is Robin who doesn't want to pay?

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What is the value of Upwork if they are not the middle man here? They were taking the payments, they should take the risk of fraudulent payments.

It's a very common business model nowadays. Turo did the same w.r.t car rentals, there's endless stories about people getting screwed on the platform (both renters and rentees). In every single instance Turo's answer has been "Sounds like the two of you have a dispute. Sounds rough. Hope you two can figure it out!"

Providing an illusion of service for a high price has always been a popular business model.

> How is the bank or Upwork the bad guy here when it is Robin who doesn't want to pay?

Upwork takes: * 3% fee on each payment on the client side; * 20% fee of first $500 earnings with the client; * 10% fee of $500-$10k earnings with the client; * 5% fee of earnings over $10k with the client.

So in this case Upwork took at least 8% of this $12.5k or 1000 USD but I think they took even more. If they don't take risks of fraudulent payments then why do they continue to take a cut in each time?

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