The four platforms this site tracks (micro1, Mercor, Terac and AfterQuery) are real companies with public role postings and a working payment history. But they are not the only names you will run into once you start searching for AI training work, and the wider space has drawn plenty of operators who look almost identical to a real one until you are a week into unpaid “assessments.”
These are the patterns that keep showing up in contractors’ after-the-fact accounts, not a company blacklist, so you can recognise one before you have sunk hours into it.
Rejection is not a scam signal
Start here, because it accounts for most of the “is this a scam” confusion. Being rejected after an interview, having an application sit unreviewed for weeks, or being unable to share your project name or your pay with anyone, including strangers online asking for proof, are all normal features of legitimate contract work, not evidence of fraud.
A platform’s NDA on project specifics protects its client’s data, not the platform’s reputation. If someone can’t show you a payment screenshot with a project name attached, that’s usually the NDA doing its job. Judge a platform on what it does, regardless of what a rejected applicant believes about it.
The math doesn’t add up
The clearest, most checkable red flag is internally inconsistent pay. If a posting advertises a per-task rate and a completion time, multiply them out: $6.25 a task at a 2–4 minute completion time works out to $93–$187 an hour, not the $25 an hour the same posting claims. Real numbers are consistent with each other. A posting that quotes two figures that can’t both be true is using the bigger one to get you in the door and the smaller one to actually pay you.
This takes thirty seconds to check and it is worth doing on every posting that states both a task rate and an hourly equivalent.
The rate drops after you’re in
A related pattern: an advertised rate that gets cut once you’ve started, sometimes more than once. Workers have reported per-task pay cut mid-project: first one reduction, then another, with the original rate never coming back. The same shape shows up as a media-review rate that starts at $100+ an hour for new hires and is quietly down to under half that within a week.
A single renegotiation with notice and a reason is normal business. A silent cut, especially more than one, is not something a legitimate platform has any reason to do once you’ve already started the work.
Pay gated behind vague “acceptance”
Some postings pay only if your submitted work is “accepted,” with no clear rubric for what accepted means and no path to find out why something wasn’t. Quality control is real and reasonable (the four platforms this site tracks all have it), but it should come with a stated standard you can check your work against, not a black box that happens to reject enough submissions to avoid paying for the time spent making them. If the quality bar is never written down anywhere, that absence is the point.
Hours of unpaid “training” before any real task
Multi-hour unpaid assessments, training modules or “certification exams” are common across this space, and most of them are legitimate screening the way a work sample is for any job. The signal to watch for is scale: assessments that run four to six hours, repeat across multiple roles at the same company, and never convert into paid work for a meaningful share of people who complete them. At that point the “assessment” isn’t screening for the job. Supplying the free labour is the job.
If a company’s assessment output looks suspiciously like the actual product it sells (translated text, labelled images, transcribed audio), be more skeptical, not less, that the exam is real screening.
The job you’re hired for isn’t the job you’re offered
A few contractors have described being accepted into a role (a general annotation or evaluation position) and then the only task that materialises is something else entirely, like submitting selfies or biometric data for a token payment. Being screened into a stated role and then routed to a completely different, more personal one is worth walking away from, regardless of the number attached.
A recruitment post with no name attached
Outside the platforms’ own job boards, you’ll see posts like this circulating on job-focused subreddits and Facebook groups: “Hiring: AI Training & Evaluation Roles, $20–50/hr, remote, first-world countries only,” with no employer named, no link to an application page, and a request to comment your location before anything else is discussed. This is a lead-generation pattern, not a job posting. The same account often reposts the identical ad on a schedule, sometimes mixed in with generic “advice” posts to look established. A real opening names the company and links to where you actually apply.
What legitimate looks like, for comparison
Every platform this site tracks posts roles on its own domain, with a specific title, a specific application flow, and no fee at any step. None of them ask for payment to “process,” “verify” or “unlock” your account, and none pay only if your work is subjectively “accepted” against no stated standard. Their screening steps are documented, even if unevenly: a timed AI interview, a domain assessment, a coding test, the kind of thing you’d expect to see written down somewhere before you sit it.
That doesn’t make everything else automatically fake. Plenty of the wider space is real, ordinary contract work with ordinary downsides: inconsistent hours, slow reviews, pay that’s lower than advertised once you count the unpaid parts. The patterns above are specifically about the minority that isn’t, and they’re worth checking before you give a new name a real week of your time.
Before you commit real hours
- Do the rate math yourself if a posting states both a per-task fee and an hourly equivalent
- Never pay a fee, deposit, or “training cost” to apply, onboard, or get paid
- Be more cautious the longer an unpaid assessment runs and the more it resembles the company’s actual product
- Treat a rate cut after you’ve started as a reason to stop, not a reason to catch up
- Search the company’s name alongside “reddit” or “trustpilot” before investing more than an hour
You can browse open roles from the four platforms this site tracks, all of which have a public track record you can check independently rather than take on faith.