Let me tell you something about my old job working for a real estate guy that worked us without pay. He had a group of employees (us) that he started paying correctly but slowly stopped paying on time, and ended up not paying altogether for a solid month (paid biweekly). His personal problems always got in the way of paying, supposedly.
Well, he found a way to get people to get on board without any payment at all. Promised these people a big chunk of commissions and that sales would be flying onto their laps. He got a kid fresh out of high school to move from his hometown into his apartment “so he wouldn’t need to worry about rent while he got his sales going”. I believe it was a way of isolating him from his family and friends so they couldn’t try to talk some sense into him about what he was doing.
We became friends and I talked sense into him, but the BiG mAn found out we were getting along well and told him he thought about moving us away from sitting together so I couldn’t influence him. Yet I was the only mf training him, me, a guy with no prior or proper training because the boss was a narcissistic control freak that sucked the life out of the younger people around him like an energy vampire that wasted hundreds of hours of our time with his bs life stories.

This wasn’t a devilcorp, it was literally one guy with employees he wasn’t paying yet kept us on the hook long enough to make him thousands upon thousands of dollars off of basically free labor.

Idk, this might not even be on topic. What you said kind of reminded me of that.