I was contacted by a recruiter for this company, which at the time was called Brighttrip.com, but was told they were changing their name to WhereCentral.com. They were going to be a travel site, like Trip Advisor, and were looking for locals to rate certain attractions, restaurants, etc. on several different factors. I entered into a contract with them after being told I would be paid $3 each for rating 40 restaurants, and that each rating should only take me a maximum of 7 minutes.

Once I received my login for their admin site and saw that there were literally hundreds of categories (including specific menu items and ingredients) that needed ratings for each restaurant, I realized that 7 minutes was a flat-out lie. I got through my 40 activities, which probably took an average of 20 minutes each, for a total of about 10-12 hours spent. After submitting these activities, I was told that I had neglected to fill out a description field, which was actually unavailable to me in Internet Explorer, and that I was to use Firefox and go back and do that section for all 40. They also didn't like how I had done some of my numbered ratings, so those needed to be revised. I would say I spent at least 4-5 hours revising all 40 restaurants.

I submitted my activities, and my submission was confirmed by my contact. I was supposed to receive payment within 45 days according to the contract. However, after 60 days I still had not received my money. I tried to email my contact twice over 2 weeks, but received no reply. Then I tried to email the general recruiting mailbox that she had contacted me from initially--and it came back as an invalid email address. Apparently this company no longer exists, and they didn't feel it necessary to pay their contractors for their hard work. Obviously, it's not going to be worth it to pursue legal action for $120, but I want to make sure that if this company ever tries to contact anyone for work again that no one spends their valuable time on it.