How to ensure you are not scammed??

Dear guys

What precautions can you put in place when making an order from one of these companies to assist in writing a piece of work. I would like to know how we can ensure we are not scammed and how we can protect ourselves as my research has shown there are alot of cowboys.

From what I know you should remember these points:

- Cheaper price will usually get you inferior product,

- Customer service - the better their response time and the more helpful their responses, the more chances your paper will be written well and on time. If you want to talk to their operators, will they be able to call you if you live your phone number (that way you may check their location),

- Payment options - if they only use a 3rd party international institutions to process your payment (like 2Checkout) or if they use their own facilities. Do they offer bank transfer options (if they do, they have to provide you with their bank name and location, which could give you an idea where the company might be located).

Go to whois.net

Any website without a valid physical USA or UK address is likely a scam.

After you get the address, you can then google the address to find out if it is a real or made up address.

It's quite simple, actually. Avoid any site that charges less than $14 per page for custom writing. Even $15 is questionable. It's impossible to maintain a staff of qualified, American writers with master or doctoral degrees by charging customers less than $14 per page, as qualified, American writers simply will not work for less than $10 per page (bare minimum) in compensation.

Fraudulent sites like AccessEssays from the Philippines charge customers only $7.55 per page. That means the writer probably gets $2-3 per page. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? Any American writer would LAUGH OUT LOUD at the thought of working for that chump change.

Wise up, America! Unless you want to receive ESL rubbish, ignore any site that charges less than $14 per page (no matter how many empty "guarantees" the site advertises).

- talk to someone on the phone before you order. their customer service people will reflect the quality of their organization.

- ensure that the company has a writer first before you pay. a company that says they will find you a writer after payment is received is NOT to be trusted.

- 14$/ page is really quite low. closer to 16- 20$ per page is standard for non-rush rates (non-rush typically being more than 2 days to complete). for a rush rate, you may expect to pay closer to 30$/per page. if you want to save money, don't wait until the last minute to order. especially now. this is one of the big busy seasons of the year and ordering early will not only save you money, but it will make it more likely that a reputable company will find you a writer. while companies never like to tell a potential client "sorry, we can't find a writer," it does happen.

The best way to not get ripped off is to write your own papers. What is wrong with you? I worked for three degrees, I earned them, I learnt from them. You pay about $100 for a rubbish essay and think you're winning. Pathetic! Life bever works out for people who cheat.

Lavinia... just curious.. but when is "busy season" ?

IMO - busy season is mid march to the end of may and then mid october to early december. in my experience, january is the slowest month of the year.

How can you make sure the company actually has a writer?

Well, in my experience, it is really difficult to find a good company who will write your papers with that superb quality. Even freelancers sometimes cannot meet the the standards imposed by the students coz' their instructors are definitely the end-evaluator whether to revise or put an A+++.

Writing firms out there can be scammers if:
1. They OVERCHARGE the cost of your papers (most of them are from middle east - e.g pakistans, indians, etc.). I believe papers should cost a minimum of $15 per page and a maximum of $30 per page especially for early deadlines.

2. They will ask you to wait and wait and wait until your deadlines runs out and they still don't have a writer to write for you.

3. They don't want to talk to you at all either via chat, phone, etc.

True. Bare minimum of $15 to attract, afford, and maintain PhD-level writers from American universities. However, many scam sites now charge about $15 because they know it appears suspicious if they charge less than that much.


Not true. Maximum of $60 per page for urgent orders completed by PhD-level writers from American universities.

The prices that I reference here are based on those offered by the TRUELY American sites in the industry.

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A method to try and ensure you are not scammed in the UK.

All companies or individuals who write essays for student have a legal requirement to be registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioners Office (as per the Data Protection Act). To become registered with the ICO you must have previously registered with Company House. With this in mind, before doing business with anyone I recommend that you search the ICO database, for the company or individual:

ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/promoting_data_privacy/keeping_the_register.aspx

You then ask the potential service provider for a landline number. Ensure that the landline number correlates to the telephone area code for the address given on the database.

It is a criminal offense to offer a service involving any kind of data (in the UK) and not be a registered data controller.

As I'm UK based, I am not aware of any similar international legislation. If you are aware of relevant legislation, please post.

This is by no means a way to ensure that you won't be scammed. It roots out some of the lower-level Indian/Ukrainian websites, but that's it. Anyone with a bit of money and the know-how could be registered in both places in a matter of weeks (if not days), no matter what country they're actually in.

noted, thank you

If you want to make sure you don't get scammed, then write the paper yourself. Other than that, you can try to find an enterprising classmate who would be willing to spend his free time writing your essay for a set fee. That way you are at least sure of who your writer is and where to find him to knock him out if he doesn't deliver. You can also opt to not pay the writer if his work is lousy. Of course that is wishful thinking as any decent college student who is serious about his studies will not have the time to do the work for you. So when you hire a writing company, say a Hail Mary and hope that they deliver the paper on time, in decent English (at the very least), and with all requirements addressed in your paper. There is no way to assure yourself of not getting scammed these days are the companies are nearly impossible to verify unless you hire a private investigator. So save yourself the trouble. Either write the paper yourself or, hope and pray that you get a decent paper for the money you were willing to pay for it.

@smiley73 There are freelancers that make a living from writing these essays and hiring a writer is not always about time. I have done three courses for a student who had scored a C in the first three weeks of their 8 weeks course. I brought it to an A because that is what i do and she got her straight As for the three courses. I will not refute that the industry is full of scams but you can get a decent writer.

Fredkarter,
BSN&PH

@Fredkarter I tend to disagree with your statement. If a student really cares about his grade and wants to get a good mark on his paper, then time is of the essence when hiring a writer. A procrastinating student who waits till 2-1 day before the deadline to find a writer to write his paper is playing with fire. The reputable and reliable writers need more time than that to come up with a well written paper. Sure there are writers who can do the job in one or 2 days, but that leaves the quality of the paper open to question.

Why is there a question regarding the quality fo the paper? The question stems from the requirements of the presentation. Does it require heavy research? Does the writer need to create interview transcripts? Does the writer need to create electronic versions of the interviews done? What specific requirements does the paper have such as in the case of power point presentations? What sort of specific editing is required for video reports? Not all the research writers are asked to do these days are just based on pounding away on the keyboard. These are actual project requirements I have had to deal with in the past that made the amount of time before completing the order a race against time with regards to its completion. There are time constraint requirements that make the proper timing of the order placement just as important as hiring a reliable writer.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. There's ZERO difference in quality between projects that I book a day or two before they're due and projects that I book weeks in advance. The only difference is that the rush deadline increases the inconvenience to me and, therefore, the price. To affect the quality of my work detrimentally, a large project would have to be ordered only a few hours before deadline, because one or two days is plenty of time for me to write 25-50+ pages of high-quality work if I really have to and if the client is willing to pay me enough to completely rearrange my schedule (and my non-work life) to get it done. Even something substantial that I have to write in a few hours is still going to be much better than the vast majority of students in that course could produce in a week; but it could end up with some minor mistakes that I'd ordinarily catch and correct through proofreading, because if the deadline is just barely enough time to get it written, there's just no time to let the finished project sit long enough afterwards for me to do what's called a "cold" proofread.


With respect to this and your other comments about what you list as the "requirements of the presentation," when someone orders a piece of primary research, professional academic writers don't actually conduct research by collecting real data from real subjects. What we do is create questionnaires and other original survey instruments, but we fabricate what's called "mock data" and then analyze and discuss those mock data. This is fully explained to the customer and agreed to in advance and in almost 20 years of writing for a living, I don't think any client has ever changed his mind about ordering a primary-research project after being informed about how this is really done. The same goes for interviews: we create original interview questions and then usually write and analyze mock responses to those questions qualitatively. On only a very few occasions, I've actually conducted real interviews of a specific person by phone when that was required; but nobody in his right mind would ever think that real interviews (or real primary research of any kind) could possibly be scheduled, conducted, and then written up on one day's notice, so that just doesn't happen. In my opinion, anybody who suggests that professional academic writers actually collect real data from real subjects for primary-research projects has never really earned a living doing this.

Exactly. It also depends on what the respective writer has on their schedule at the time the "rush" order comes in.

I've had clients place an order and need it the next morning (or sooner) and say "but it's only 3 pages."

Well, sure, it may be "only" 3 pages, but that still involves research and time. Not to mention, the writer will either have to rush their current projects or adjust deadline for other customers. Best case (for the client, but not the writer) is that the writer is able to squeeze in the rush order without impacting his/her other clients' projects or deadlines. Because, well, why in the world would a writer want to eat or sleep? We can writer 24/7 with no brain lag, right? Ha!

Sure, 3-pagers do not take me long but I still want enough time to review the paper before noting it as completed. I'm human and I make mistakes, and when I do I prefer to be the one who sees/catches them! ;)

There are very few 3-pg projects that I couldn't squeeze in overnight unless I'm already under pressure to meet another deadline. However, it's inconvenient and professors don't often assign projects due the next day; so definitely expect to pay a premium for my inconvenience, if that just means writing your rush project instead of relaxing in front of the TV if that's what had planned for the rest of that evening. As a company writer who was simultaneously building a private clientele, I couldn't even count the number of times that I grabbed a rush 3-pg project due the next day(or several) while I was already working late that night. What's really annoying is when someone emails me with "URGENT" in the subject field and asks me for a difficult 10-pg project due in a few hours as though it's ever appropriate to procrastinate that much and expect me to treat that as some kind of "emergency" that isn't totally self-created and unnecessary.

On the broader topic of not getting scammed, there's nothing you can to "guarantee" it if it's your first project with any writer or company. All you can do is minimize your potential risk by ordering only a short project first, before trusting that person or company with a longer project. Generally, there are legit writer and scam writers: the former will provide your project as promised and the latter won't. There probably aren't really any writers (or companies) whose scam involves first providing a high-quality original project just to suck you into ordering a much longer project a few weeks or months later and then not providing the larger project.

That sums it up neatly, and it's the truth.

On "urgent" orders and student procrastination, I'll add that it's frustrating when the student comes for a miracle at the last minute. Not that a legit writers can't pull off these miracles, because we can. We do... all the time. It's frustrating nonetheless.

If you plan on hiring a writer who regularly posts at this forum, then I would ask you to look at the length of time that the writer has been a member here. The longer the profile has existed, the more participation the writer has had in various forum sections, the more reliable the writer would tend to be. Remember the longevity of a writer's career depends upon how well he works with his clients. His trustworthy quotient is also measured by the length of time he has managed to stay at this forum without any negative reviews. Ignore any flaming wars the writer may have been involved in in the past. Being argumentative is not proof that a writer is a scammer, it just means he knows how to push back when required. Do not take that to mean that the writer will be mean to the student either. That is the last thing the writer would do since he seriously needs your business. These are the considerations that I believe a student should have to ensure that he will not be hiring a scam writer to work on his paper.

Well, students these days prefer to use an AI writer to complete their papers. That most definitely ensures that the student is not scammed but, does not assure the student that he will get a quality paper worthy of submission and grading. That will just assure him of meeting compliance requirements for his class. So, how does he hire a human writer and avoid getting scammed? It is all in the way that you assess the company and the writers that they have. When directly hiring the writer, ask for writing samples in related subjects and look up his username online. There are ways of verifying that the writer you plan to deal with is not a con artist. If he uses the same username across various platforms, then that person is more than likely to be on the level with his business dealings.

That's exactly why I created the same ID on this forum in 2008 that I'd always used as my ID at every essay company (before going completely independent in 2013), and also as my primary direct local email address since 1999 or 2000. Good legitimate writers want prospective customers to be able to review and cross-reference our reputations and representations dating as far back as possible and on as many different platforms as possible, because we have absolutely nothing to hide and we understand the reputational and good-will value of maintaining a single online ID for 25 years.