Hired worker ambushed me with 18 hours logged in the last 2 days. Fraud?

I've been working with a new hire who accepted a contract last week. We've been going over the expectations for the past week or so. They logged 3.5 hours last week, which is perfectly fine.

This week, they logged 0:10 minutes on Monday.

They had made one deliverable where I noticed they had not done a lot. We had a quick Zoom call in an effort to steer him in the right direction.

Yesterday, he delivered something that was \*still\* very far from complete.

Then I checked his hours and he logged **11 HOURS** on Wednesday and **7 MORE HOURS** Thursday.

This is for a project that I believe can be finished in 5-6 hours (if I or a highly skilled professional did it). I am not a highly skilled professional. I told him it would be ok if it took longer than that, but 5-6 hours would be the eventual goal. I was expecting it to take 10-20 hours to complete. Now he's worked on it for over 21 hours and we're still not half way compete. This contract was supposed to be ongoing, so we'd be cranking out projects...maybe 1 or 2 per week.

No Upwork hire has ever logged more than 3.5 hours in a single day for me (this is my 3rd contract). Working 11 HOURS in a single day seems like complete bullshit. Especially when he follows up with 7 more hours the next day.

I immediately paused his contract. He admitted that he should have checked with me every 4 or 5 hours or so just to make sure we were on the right track.

I feel like there are 1 or 2 issues here. He's either 1) Lying about his hours or 2) Lying about his skill level.

The thing he produced is really not usable unless he were to finish the project. I don't want to work with this guy anymore and I'd like to contest his hours. I'm ok with maybe paying HALF the hours, but I really don't think he worked 18 hours in two days and I'm not even going to use what he produced.

When UpWork settles disputes, what kind of evidence are they looking for when they side with one party or the other?

Edit: Looks like the hours were tracked.