I feel sorry for OP.  It really sucks to be waiting on the receiving end of an invoice with no hope in sight of getting your hard-earned money.  It really sucks to be in that position.<p>I don't know the specifics of this case, but I have encountered some of the same red flags that the author found.  I worked as a remote contractor for a company, was interviewed over Skype by the CTO, had most of my interaction with the technical manager over Skype.  I worked mostly by myself outside the scope of the other developers.  Best of all, the codebase was mostly written by offshored developers.<p>This all sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead it was an amazing experience.  The tech manager was incredibly competent and great at managing umpteen developers in 4 countries.  The codebase was reasonable to work with and I was able to move really quickly to get things done.<p>Maybe I got lucky, or maybe these red flags don't have any bearing.  I only have anecdotes, so I don't know the answer.