Pay attention, freelancers! Kdot UK company is a scammer.

[tonyqus]

I got a small freelancer deal from Kdot UK (aka Waterlily Labs early this year. 

The whole R&D team of this company is located in Sri Lanka. The company is so poor according to the public company filing history and the founder cannot afford to hire staff from London. However, I used to think that the company was located in London. It should not be a scammer in any case. But I'm wrong. And I'm so naive that I even didn't request a pre-payment for this deal.

Here is some public information from company-infomration.service.gov.uk

The boss Krish got to know me in 2022 because he is one of the users of my open-source project NPOI. I did talk to him a few times without any consulting fee. I want to do him a favor and see if we can cooperate. This is usually how a freelancer business works for an open-source maintainer.

The dev/qa process of this company is very slow. I don't know why. They even don't use GitHub or any Git-based source control system. They just use TFS and there are no tags or release branches for their code. The code management is in a mess. And there is no agile management board for task management. It's usually based on Excel/PDF or some random document sent by the project manager.

And I did work for them for 2 months since April 2024 although it's not daily working. Although it's just about 30 hours of development work, it takes me a lot of time to follow up again and again because the process is so slow and it pops up randomly. And the code is kind of a mountain of shit. The code of this project is a bit old and the original maintainers are all gone or resigned. I don't know why.

What happened to this deal

However, I got nothing from the boss after the 2 months of work. He just keeps telling me my code submitted is a shit. And there are a few features missed and the client is very dissatisfied with this project. And we stop using your code anymore. It's done. We will not pay you at all. What the fuck?

Suppose my code is not good, why don't you inform me earlier? How can you approve this code to go to production? I don't have permission to touch the production at all. And your dev said the code is fine and features are working. We can go ahead. And the code did work. I don't know why you say it's totally not working after it's deployed to production and delivered to the client.

If I don't do my job and the code is not committed, it's my fault. But I did commit and it was working on QA environment. If QA finds bugs, I will fix bugs but the QA verified my code and it looks working. Then he should pay me the money. He mentioned my rate is a bit high and then I reduced it to 50 USD/hour as he wished. For 30 hours of work, it should be 1500 USD. However, I got nothing.

Investigation of this company

After I investigated the company, I did notice that this company is so poor. And Krish knew it very well. He cannot afford to hire a freelancer at the rate of 50 USD per hour at all. That's why he do the trick and he kept saying my code is a shit.

During the investigation, I contacted a few ex-staff of this company. They told me that Krish is a very selfish boss although he is also from Sri Lanka. And he always says that your code is shit or something similar to his staff and other freelancers. But they don't know if he paid them or not.

The previous team lead left the company and a few staff left. They are somewhat pissed off by Krish. It's a big surprise for me. That means almost everyone is disappointed with the management of this company.
I agree with one of his ex-staff. Here is his comment about Krish

Krish has his own coding standards and stuff. So if we don't follow those he criticizes people. He expects more and more always.
Don't worry about your code. He is the same for everyone.

You see. Anyone who served him has the same feeling.