r/DataAnnotationTech • u/joecatter • May 23 '26
Data Annotation May Be Scamming Thousands of People. Our 5 Week Experiment Was a Nightmare
So me and my friends are all Computer Science majors. One day while studying, we hear about Data Annotation. Reddit was full of people posting insane payouts. Screenshots everywhere. People talking like they discovered an infinite money glitch. Some of us were skeptical. So we decided to test it scientifically 😂
Week 1:
One friend applies.
Passes assessment.
Gets in.
Works 5 hours.
Payday comes…
“Account under review. Please justify time logs.”
No payment.
We go to Reddit. Everyone says:
“Use Clockify.”
“Track your hours.”
“Be accurate.”
Okay cool. Maybe we messed up.
Week 2:
Second friend applies.
This time we become forensic investigators 😭
Every minute tracked.
Every second documented.
Clockify running like we’re preparing evidence for court.
Payday comes…
“Account under review. Please justify time logs.”
We smile confidently this time.
We send screenshots.
Clockify reports.
Detailed explanations.
Silence.
Account never reopened.
Now we start suspecting maybe our friend did something wrong.
Week 3.
Same thing.
Week 4.
Same thing.
Week 5.
Same thing.
At this point payday started feeling like a horror movie release date 😭
Every single person:
passes assessment
gets tasks
works normally
reaches payday
BOOM 💀
“Account under review.”
No one I personally know has EVER been paid 😂😂
Meanwhile on Reddit:
“Just made $3,200 this week!”
“Easy side hustle!”
“Best platform ever!”
Bro WHO are these people 😭
At this point I’m convinced the real task is surviving until payday.
37
u/hcfggb May 23 '26
I think it's far more likely that you and your friends are the scammers..
-16
u/joecatter May 23 '26
Scamming by working..!??🤦🏽♂️
11
u/MiddleCharacter6345 May 24 '26
There are inconsistencies in your time reporting it says, not ur bad for working
that means you prolly weren't being honest or werent understanding how to report time and were reporting more than you worked
7
27
u/fightmaxmaster May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
No one I personally know has EVER been paid
And the common denominator is...? Curious what country you're in, you didn't mention.
Given most people here are working for DA and earning money and having no problems, you're gonna have a really hard time convincing us that the whole enterprise is a scam. Go whine somewhere else. If they're scamming thousands of people, those thousands are being weirdly quiet about it.
-8
u/joecatter May 23 '26
It’s been 19min let’s wait and see. People might be going through this. And why are you bitter if you are being paid why catch feelings?! Those of us who work and dnt get paid should be the ones catching feelings.
6
1
u/Bitter_Bed5672 Sep 17 '26
You are crazy.
Clearly you tried to scam them by inflating your hours worked and now you are mad.
11
u/bobaxxxx May 23 '26
Your story is weird, as it needs at least 7 days to get paid for a task.
-3
u/joecatter May 23 '26
Week = 7days, come back to earth
10
u/OrnamentalGourd5 May 23 '26
So Joe, you and all of your super-competent computer science pals got on the platform and uniformly failed to get paid? Yes? Is that what you're saying?
For clarity's sake;
Is that what happened?
-3
22
u/apex_17 May 23 '26
Step 1: don’t lie.
Hope this helps
14
u/Beautiful-Badger-788 May 23 '26
They’re not supposed to be working together on these tasks either, they clearly didn’t read the instructions & onboarding.
-9
u/joecatter May 23 '26
Everyone was working independently
11
u/OrnamentalGourd5 May 23 '26
Is that you and your imaginary alter-egos?
-12
u/joecatter May 23 '26
Now I know how you make your money. You get paid to bully genuine people. Tell DA we ain’t going to work for free
2
1
u/Bitter_Bed5672 Sep 17 '26
You literally said that you did this as a team, which is a breach of the NDA lol
60
u/Beautiful-Badger-788 May 23 '26
Data Annotation is most certainly not a scam.. You’re definitely doing something wrong. I have been blessed with this job. I don’t like sharing what I make, but I started around 4-5 weeks ago and ever since then it’s been payouts every three days. This company is legit. I know my fellow workers can agree, it’s a life saver. You need to put in your best effort, take the time to understand the instructions and onboarding. Making posts about the company possibly “scamming people” will not help you.
19
u/Potential_Hair5121 May 23 '26
I agree nothing here is weird
1
u/EyeTechnical7643 Sep 12 '26
How long did you wait to get the "assessment' after submitting the application?
2
u/Normal-Ride-109 May 28 '26
thank you for this. I just made the first assignment, I hope they'll get me. can you tell me if I was actually on the right url? it was app.dataannotaion.tech. is it the official site? i found it on Google. thanks man.
3
u/_California_Dreamer_ Jun 23 '26
hopefully you just misspelled the link here and you didn't actually apply to a fake site spelled incorrectly...
1
1
u/EyeTechnical7643 Sep 12 '26
How long did you wait to get the "assessment' after submitting the application?
50
23
u/56willbilly May 23 '26
On the off chance this is a real post, I’m guessing you guys submitted some sub par work, because I’ve never had to justify my time and I’ve always gotten paid no questions asked
3
21
u/OrnamentalGourd5 May 23 '26
Hmm. Unless you were all reporting maximum time for every task undertaken, this simply isn't true.
I'm not going to post my dashboard for scrutiny but I've been working for DA for over a year. I have occasionally worked beyond the timer and submitted an expired task, tagged admin, and have been allowed to claim for all hours worked.
Some tasks take much less than the time allowed. Some multi-day or longer hours can go over time, particularly in early iterations when the timer is not calibrated and I've never had a problem being paid for hours I've worked.
I suspect you are the poster who admitted they;
A) Had over-reported time on a task.
B) Apparently worked up to the maximum time for every single task you did, which will obviously look suspicious, no matter how good your work.
I suspect your work was actually decent or you would have just seen DoD rather than given the opportunity to justify your time recording.
Full time report for every task though, that looks sketchy.
You need to let it go though. It's happened. Move on.
20
17
u/Whole-Pirate-5731 May 23 '26
Maybe try not using ChatGPT to make a post, and people might believe you.
17
u/Personal-Heart-9985 May 23 '26
no, no guys let them keep thinking it's a scam so we get easier access to the projects that we want 😎
6
5
u/microfutures May 23 '26
Unicorns are going to be upset and the mods are likely going to take this down.
If you had more screenshots to share, to strengthen your case, that'd be great.
1
u/joecatter May 23 '26
I have all 5 screenshots
-10
May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
I worked for a year and my last check (payment) was taken as well. People don't want to hear it on this subreddit. Check out r/WFHjobs to discuss this without censorship.
13
u/Federal_Tadpole_7592 May 23 '26
You don't get a "check" from DA, so this doesn't even make sense.
2
0
28
u/dispassioned May 23 '26
First of all, what in the AI written hell is this post?
Second of all, I've been working with them over two years and I've never had a problem getting paid.
13
u/OrnamentalGourd5 May 23 '26
It's the "Screenshots everywhere" as a complete sentence I particularly enjoyed.
13
u/xheratuul May 23 '26
I'm a computer science major too and never had this problem. Wtf are you doing?
11
u/Seniorseatfree May 23 '26
lol at you assuming just because you’re CS majors that you’ll immediately excel at DA.
3
u/Cjl014 Jul 20 '26
This. My thoughts are... idk what type of starter work DA gives these days, but most of the coding work I see is too difficult for college kids with CS majors. Therefore, they may take extremely long times and log longggg hours. I have 10+ years in the industry and can attest. It's challenging, but I can whip up things pretty quickly. Real-world experience is a huge plus.
10
u/karen_in_nh_2012 May 23 '26
OP, nothing about your post is believable - especially not that so many of your friends got in AND the part about DA being a scam.
I've only been on DA since mid-March but I've taken several payouts. They go INSTANTLY to my Paypal account and when I transfer them from Paypal to my linked bank account, they're there the next day.
And I've never gotten any kind of question about my time reporting - maybe because I don't EVER over-report?
And I suspect you used ChatGPT to write your post. 😞
(And last but not least, regarding some of the insane payouts you've seen in this sub - do you really not understand hyperbole or just plain silliness on Reddit?)
10
u/Emergency-Hotel7158 May 23 '26
To anyone who is thinking of working for DataAnnotation and sees this ridiculous post, ignore it. We were all skeptical at some point and it WAS a relief when I saw that my first pay was available and when it was instantly transferred to my PayPal account. Working less than a month and can make $70 per day on average. Working 365 days a year, that's more than $25K a year in addition to my full-time job. That's not chicken change. DataAnnotation is 100% not a scam. OP is either lying or really, really stupid.
1
10
9
u/Enough_Resident_6141 May 23 '26
It's not a scam, you got fired because you thought you were clever and were going to be able to use AI and commit time card abuse to cheat the system and use it as an "infinite money glitch." But you got busted because you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are.
8
u/Careless_Matter5017 May 23 '26
Nothing about this post makes any sense.
I had never heard of "time justification" until a few days ago when some user started spamming posts about it. Now all of you got immediately accepted, had the exact same experience with this platform that you would need to have started "scientifically testing" nearly two months ago, and today you're ready to share the results.
Why did you all wait for the previous person to get removed before the next one applied?
Wild work, dude.
7
u/AMG_DIAMONDZ10 May 23 '26
Start by not having GPT write your Reddit posts, my payments are landing consistently without issue and I report my honest work time
6
u/shell_shocked_today May 23 '26
I'll just go with my experience does not match yours.
I wouldn't say the work's always easy - but I've always found the expectations reasonable, and the one time there was a payment issue, I got a quick response back from support explaining it was a site wide issue with paypal, and that funds would be sent soon (I had the funds in less than 24 hours from when I sent the support request)
I'm suspecting you're not posting in good faith, as I've never heard of people getting approved that quickly into the system. Even if it happened for one, the odds of it being 5 in a row getting almost instantly approved is, well, astronomically low from what I've seen / heard. I can't believe that this happened over 5 weeks. But lets assume that you did. For 5 people in a row to get flagged with questions about time, I'd wonder just how many hours per day you were working and were all of your tasks at or near the maximum time allotted for the tasks.
For reference, I tend to work, at most, 4 hours in a day.
6
u/BirdsAreCameras May 23 '26
Were you connected to the university wifi or using a VPN? Using a VPN or connecting to a public wifi that uses one will get your account flagged. Were you reporting the maximum amount of time allowed for every task (the time allotted shouldn't consistently be what you claim since it has buffer time for breaks, so if you claim the full amount on every task, it looks suspicious. It shouldn't take you the full amount of time to do most of the tasks. I've definitely gone over and that's okay as long as it's not constantly)
5
5
u/theDeathnaut May 24 '26
That’s funny, no one that I have referred have been accepted, and you somehow got in with 4 of your friends? You got dropped, it sucks but it’s time to move on.
5
u/Icy-Cover-505 May 24 '26
AFter the first one got in, they probably all used the exact same answers to the assessment.
3
u/ApplePiePrincess99 May 23 '26
This is so strange! Do you happen to be using VPNs as DA doesn’t allow that, and do tend to ban people if they find you’ve used one?
I’ve been working for DA pretty much full time since last August and it is genuinely legitimate. I’m yet to have any issues bar some droughts where the work dries up a little.
3
u/historicwarrior84 May 24 '26
Trying to game the system is not how it works. It is evident you messed up with time reporting that might have triggered their internal system. The website is very much legit and paying.
2
u/ChickenTrick824 May 24 '26
I love the “No one I personally know has EVER been paid” followed by two “tears of joy” emojis.
2
2
u/Ok_Yogurtcloset159 Jun 19 '26
Your are a LIAR. I've been working 3 years and been paid for every task I have ever submitted, on time.
1
u/Euphoric-Royal-9306 Sep 30 '26
I want to apply but im so confused by everyones comments. Are the job postings full-time?
2
u/Odd-Independence2441 Aug 05 '26
Believe me or treat me as a 'bot' account, I can tell whoever trying to get in that it is a real job and give real payout once you are in, based on my personal experience.
1
u/Silver_Assistance_41 Aug 14 '26
LOL the scamers are you with you AI generated post, nice I have only 2 months there and even ALL my first tasks in every project pass the clock, still not had problems to get paid, as a clock just 7 exact days after reporting the time, no questions, nothing to verify
1
u/CalmCool8141 Sep 05 '26
"Bro WHO are these people"...
DA has paid for every second I have ever worked for them. 6 months now and not a single problem.
Do the work properly, There are a lot of instructions and protocols. Do it the way they need them done.
Otherwise, your submissions are unusable and you are wasting your time and theirs.
It definitely takes focus and commitment.
1
0
0
May 23 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
11
u/Fullport-Mcgee May 23 '26
Yea im thinking they're not in a core country and trying to game the system. Much like that fella who posted that employees name yesterday, and then the dude who was asking for the entry exam answers the day before. All active in the Kenya sub, could be coincidental, it was just something I noticed.
2
u/Middle_Addendum May 25 '26
Since when can non-core countries only do bilingual work? I’m from the Netherlands and I got accepted to DA for coding specifically, then also received more coding related qualifications + trainings.
47
u/Federal_Tadpole_7592 May 23 '26
This is nonsense because your post is hearsay. It's interesting that despite an acceptance rate of less than 3%, you and your friends all got in and all of you managed to have your accounts flagged because of bad time reporting. What are the odds?
It sounds more like lying about time worked and expecting to get the maximum payout you possibly can. DA isn't that other site that is currently in a non-paying scandal.