Given how much time you've wasted with this, my feeling is that overall you still lost. They owe you money for the time spent as well. Good on you for publishing this, but you should have mentioned their company name in the title, so that hopefully it show up in search engine results and this alerts others to not collaborate with them.
This has also been happening constantly in the past few years with something called Ripple, their token being $XRP. Anyone with more than 5 brain cells can tell that they're scammers with no product market fit, yet their marketing attracts the dumb opportunists.
I see nice things like this and I wonder if they could’ve spent that money on actually making better service and proving more coverage in hard to reach areas.