Disclaimer.

PaidProof helps you collect contract acceptance, client-side IP and user-agent data at signing, file delivery proof, and the payment timestamp. It assembles that into a dated, content-hashed PDF you can submit to your card processor or your client’s issuing bank when responding to a chargeback.

• —It does not decide chargebacks. Banks and card networks do.
• —It does not draft or review contracts for legal sufficiency. Use a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
• —It does not file disputes for you, communicate with your processor on your behalf, or guarantee a response deadline.
• —It does not verify your client’s identity beyond capturing the IP and user-agent of whoever signed in the browser.
• —It does not reverse a payment, freeze a payout, or recover lost funds. Those are functions of the payment processor.

Chargeback decisions involve facts specific to the transaction, the cardholder’s claim category (e.g. “product not received”, “product not as described”, “unauthorized”), the network rules at the time, and the processor’s evidence requirements. PaidProof gives you a structured evidence package most processors ask for; it cannot guarantee any particular dispute will be decided in your favour.

Nothing in PaidProof — the contract templates, the dispute-kit PDF, the marketing copy, the support replies, this page — is legal advice. For advice on a specific dispute, your contract terms, or your jurisdiction’s consumer-protection rules, consult a licensed attorney.

You are responsible for what you upload, what you sign, what you deliver, and how you respond to a chargeback notice. PaidProof’s liability for any claim arising from your use of the service is limited as set out in Terms §10.

Click-to-sign in PaidProof is a Simple Electronic Signature (SES). It is admissible as evidence under: US ESIGN Act + UETA; EU eIDAS Regulation (910/2014, SES tier); UK Electronic Communications Act 2000; Canada PIPEDA + provincial UECA; Australia Electronic Transactions Act 1999. The equivalent-to-handwritten-signature presumption only attaches at the Qualified Electronic Signature(QES) tier in the EU and UK. For EU contracts that legally require QES — some real-estate transactions, certain employment contracts, public-sector contracting — use a Qualified Trust Service Provider (see the EU Trusted List Browser); PaidProof’s upload-back path stores the externally-signed PDF and references it in the dispute kit.

IP and user-agent are captured at signing because processors ask for them. They are corroborating signals, not identity proof. VPN, NAT, carrier-grade NAT, shared WiFi, and user-agent spoofing all sever the link between a captured value and an individual person. US courts have repeatedly held that an IP address alone does not identify the person at the keyboard. Treat the data accordingly.

For sub-five-figure invoices, cross-border litigation is rarely economical. Judgment recognition between jurisdictions is a separate, harder problem — the Hague 2005 Convention on Choice of Court Agreements helps within its contracting states (the list is not universal). For most international freelance work, the realistic levers are the chargeback response and the delivery gate, not court.

Because freelancers under chargeback stress have been told by every other tool that “you’ll never lose another dispute” — and that’s not true anywhere. We’d rather under-promise here and over-deliver where it counts: the PDF, the tamper-evident row, the trigger, and the signed-URL access log.

For high-value contracts, talk to a lawyer in your jurisdiction.PaidProof is tooling. The contract is yours, the parties are yours, and the legal weight is yours. We don’t replace counsel; we organize evidence so counsel (or a processor, or a court) can see it.