So I recently have been scammed by a freelancer. He told me that I would have to use a fixed rate and pay everything upfront and release the payments in order for him to use the funds for the project. But nothing has been done so we are currently in a dispute phase. He did not respond within the first 5 days and we have moved onto the arbitration phase. And I know he's not going to respond again and definitely not be willing to pay for the arbitration fee since he knows he is going to lose anyways. They did give me an option that I could just pay it full myself for the arbitration fee and still continue with arbitration and which I'm okay of doing because the total money that I have lost was total of 10k... which is so much money that I can't afford to lose. But my only concern is that even if I were to pay and move on to arbitration I doubt that they have any authority to force the freelancer to pay back the money to upwork.. then I would just end up paying and losing more money for arbitration and get literally nothing out of it for winning the case... so then should I just give up and not even try for arbitration? And just take the loss and move on? Please help any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
