HERE IS THE PROBLEM WITH MANUAL MODE.

I am definitely NOT saying you did the following. I am saying that people WILL do the following, and UPWORK is protecting themselves from this, and you are caught in the cross fire:

A guy gets 100 stolen credit cards. He creates 200 fake accounts 100 providers and 100 clients. In each account they do a bunch of "manual hours" over a period of time, billing the cards, all along. Since it is all manual hours there is no real effort, just enter the hours and bill the client. There is no real trail that real work is or is not happening. 80 of the card holders get wise and immediately reverse the charge. but 20 holders are not looking.

This guy keeps doing manual work, and billing the cards.

When the card holder finally realizes and reverse 6 months worth of charges, each one has racked up $12K worth of PAID work.

Now as you wish, upwork simply pays the reversed charges out of their pocket.

And this guy makes a cool quarter of a million off of his 20 accounts.

Hey, TIME TO DO IT AGAIN!

Rinse and repeat.

I am not saying I know the answer, but I do know that if Upwork's site can be used to extract money from stolen cards, they will go out of business.

The main way that businesses avoid this is to require PROOF that actual work is happening. This makes it too difficult to fake 100 work streams. this is why manual mode is so dangerous... there is no proof

Maybe they should require manual mode to be paid via some other means, or maybe they just dis-allow it.

At the very least it seems to me the big failure here is that upwork should tell you, when you click on manual mode, that YOU using your own intuition about a client, and YOU will be on the hook if your intuition is wrong.

Or maybe keep the ratio of non-manual work to manual work low, so if there is a charge back that can just loose their profits, but not incur losses?