I work at a software service company in India and they're paying me $400 a month. The only salary hike I got in the last 5 years was just $50 a month and for even that I had to keep begging them saying my rent has increased, food expenses are increasing. Year after year, I'm going down deeper and deeper in debt.
I'm a fairly good developer but the others in the company write shit code quality and most of them don't even write English properly. In the group chat window, I can see that some clients are annoyed when my teammates talk in text-speak.
I made a list of unhappy clients in an Excel file with some additional information like what tech stack it was, project duration, client's budget, contact details, what they're unhappy about, whether the client is friendly and reasonable, whether they micromanage, etc. and gave it to another service company under the understanding that if they manage to get the client for themselves, they'll pay me a commission. I didn't tell them how I got the list. I just told them I do freelance lead generation work and my leads are high quality. They wanted me to sign a contract as an external lead generation specialist and pay me through bank transfer but I didn't want that since that'd leave a papertrail connecting back to me. I talked to them about paying me in crypto and they weren't happy about it saying there are legal headaches they have to deal with by using crypto. The founder of the company said he'll have to pay me from his personal funds after converting to crypto so since he's not drawing a salary from the company, what he can pay me will be a lesser than what he could pay through the company as a bank transfer. I said that's okay, anything I get is good as long as it's crypto. He was a little surprised why I don't take official payments but I just told him some shit like I'm doing an experiment and he bought my story.
At first I didn't have much hope since more than 2 months had passed since I gave them the list but I just got $2500 equivalent in crypto today from them and holy shit am I ecstatic. They told me more will be coming after they sign on new clients from this list and asked me to be patient since it takes time to get a contract with a new client.
I'm gonna continue working at my current employer and milk their teet nicely and keep sending lists to this other company who's paying me a LOT more. What about you guys? Do you do anything sneaky like this?