I just left the project – I was hired by a third party agency, but it's the same job. I have to say I was paid for the 3 hours test that was the main focus in the original post–it took me about 2 hours and received 40$ paid the next Tuesday. I then went on with more training (more courses popped up) and was always paid for these and also for 2 of the first actual tasks.
This said, I left the project before starting to actively invest time in it because it's complete chaos. During the first 2 weeks we received all these different automatic courses and tests without anyone on the Slack channel replying about any doubt, question, anything. I kept on receiving emails saying I hadn't completed or had failed test X which resulted as passed and done on my dashboard. I once couldn't deliver 2 tasks and lost 40 minutes of time and then I was told it was a bug. I opened tickets and was invited to ask team leaders for help, and I didn't even know what team leaders were until I was finally added to 2 more Slack channels for my language. But... the team leaders told us to open tickets for any issue!
Some of them are also very unprofessional and even aggressive/mocking when replying, they're not even trained as project managers and there's no supervision whatsoever since they operate within their own language team channel on Slack. Some exchanges I witnessed to, and one I was unfortunately directly involved into, were what I would define toxic and would be immediately reported to HR in any real job.
Regarding the actual projects, they are quite complicated but most of all, instructions kept on changing like every half a day and basically if you want to work and have your tasks reviewed with good feedback you should spend hours every day following these endless conversations on Slack (all unpaid time).
Some people said that the tracked time didn't match their actual worked time, TLs kept on replying it will be adjusted after 5 days from working (meanwhile you should keep on working for hours hoping it will finally match, and if not, you have to pray all the Gods to find someone to actually assist you).
I'm not sure it's pure premeditated scam, I talked to some people that had worked for 3-4 weels and got finally paid, but they often received unfair/bugged feedback and it appears that eventually you are not paid, or paid less in case of bad feedback, and if it's because of yet another bug, again, pray and seek assistance... For sure it's the most chaotic project I've ever been onboarded on, if you can call that confusion an onboarding, and they launched this project way before the software and the project management were actually working and tested. This is of course not a justification and I decided not to risk not being compensated for my worked time (besides the unpaid time spent because of all these 1000 issues).
I wrote everything to the project manager of my third party agency, they told me they understood I wanted to leave the project and they had no idea of what was going on. There is no way to contact anyone from the company directly, Team Leaders tell you to open a ticket on Remotasks, Remotasks tells you should ask a Team Leader, any bug is "The Client's" fault.
I advise any professional freelancer to avoid this client if you have other things to put your time and energy into and you know how a project should look like. It's sad to see other people were enthusiastic to work on this. Most of them are very young students and were asking how to pay taxes on freelancing gigs because this is their first job. Some people even organized extra sessions to discuss feedbacks and improve... voluntarily and unpaid!
