"Big job frenzy" -> Update

The "Big job frenzy" continues! On and on and on and ...
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.

Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!

One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").

Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".

Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.

I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...

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