Hired a freelance writer who plagiarised work and now threatens me

I hired an individual freelance writer (he has no website, just an email account) on October 2016. The writer delivered a plagiarised work and I paid the money anyway. Three days ago, He emailed me threatening me of contacting my university and telling them about me unless I pay him money.

I paid him for three orders. Each one is 180 dollars. The last order was totally plagiarised but I discovered that after I paid him. I asked to redo the work and did not reply and then stalled for three months. After that, I stopped contacting him. A couple of months ago, he contacted me saying that he wants to help me with other work and I told no because he is a cheat and stole my money. Then I stopped replying to his messages. Three days ago, He emailed twice. This is his message:

"Hi, you have since refused to email. I am sending your contact and the dissertation topic and document to your college asap. I sent you an email long time ago and you still refused to email back. So I am sending the document, your contacts, email address, the document I did for you as well as the emails we exchanged to your college by end of today should I fail to get a reply from you from my other email address at gmail. Even if you had graduated that degree will be revoked and dont blame me for it."

What should I do? Please help.

First things first, did you give this person all of your private information pertaining to your university, course, and other related information? These were irrelevant to your paper in the first place so you should never have divulged that information. In fact, even in an academic outsourcing company, or with a legitimate freelance writer, these types of information will not be asked for nor required. If your answer is no, you did not provide the information to him before, then this is one of the many internet blackmail scams proliferating the web. Don't be afraid. It is an empty threat. There is nothing he can do to harm you. Now, if for some reason, you did disclose this information to the blackmailer, then you might have a problem. Be advised though, the university will not just take the word of a complete stranger, even if he does contact them with your documents, and strip you immediately of your degree. There is an investigative process involved before they can revoke your graduation certificate. If I were you, I would contact the university and inquire about these proceedings. More importantly, I would do my own investigating on the side in order to discover if the threat was followed through on. I really doubt that. This guy is trying to ruffle your feathers, hoping to scare you into paying him more money. Don't fall for it. There is a legal process in the academic world that is followed. You can't be stripped of your certificate in the blink of an eye. If he did do it, then go through the process and hope that you can defend yourself well enough to retain your diploma. That is, if the university even takes his information seriously.

No, I paid by Paypal. Maybe there was some information about me online or in email. But it was a real writer, he sent the paper to me (it was totally plagiarised but who else would know my name or email?) I have his email address, actually two but don't want to post it here and I see they could be just temporary emails.

If the email addresses are free ones, such as gmail or yahoo, then it is indeed temporary and I would not worry about that. As for the private information, it is good that you used Paypal to pay him. That means most of your private data, such as your address and bank account number, are safe. Now, did you, at any time, inform him about your university name? Note that he did not even know whether you are already a graduate or not, that means he is fishing for information. He is shooting blanks and, if you pay attention to him, you just might accidentally supply him with the ammunition he needs to keep blackmailing you.

I would contact his email provider at this point and report him for abuse. That is the first step towards ending the threat that he making upon you. By blacklisting him at the email provider, he will also be prevented from contacting you. Make sure your email account has the spam filters on and block all the known email addresses of his that you know of.

I am not questioning whether he is a real writer or not. At this point, he is nothing but a crook trying to fleece you. It is up to you to stop him. We can't do that for you. You need to take a proactive stance in preventing this blackmail from continuing. Think of avenues that he may have used to get your personal information. More importantly, talk to someone in authority at the university you graduated from on a confidential basis. Make sure you can trust this person and enlist his / her help in sorting out the mess that was created by your previous actions.

I didn't inform him about my university, but doing search its possible to find out. If they ban his email he can use another one, but I'll choose to ignore it as you suggested, thankyou.

It's yet another reason why working with 'individual freelance writers' could be risky (as opposed to legitimate US/UK based writing services). I don't imagine a legitimate writing service to email the student after months or years of order completion to blackmail him or her.

To apply your exact argument in reverse, this forum is also chock full of threads about customers getting blackmailed by essay-writing companies. I don't imagine a legitimate individual freelance writer would email a student after months (or years) after completion of an order to blackmail him or her, either.

A fair and legitimate comparison would be between un-vetted companies and un-vetted freelance writers or between essay companies and freelance writers with equally-good reputations and long-time presence on forums such as this one. Smiley73 constantly implies that any freelancer is a safer bet than any essay company, which (obviously) is a false, biased, and self-serving position, notwithstanding his claim that he's "not" here to generate any business for himself. Meanwhile, Major routinely does the exact same thing on behalf of essay companies, albeit by a slightly different method: namely, by using statements that are true but only in isolation, because they rely on totally false comparisons, such as by comparing the entire universe of all "individual freelance writers" (only) to "legitimate US/UK-based writing services," which (obviously) represents only a very miniscule subset of the entire universe of all essay companies.

The truth (which both of you actually know yourselves) is that there are totally legitimate and very conscientious, hard-working individual freelance writers and totally legitimate essay companies and that neither of them would ever exploit or blackmail their customers in any way. There are also totally unknown, anonymous freelance writers and fully-licensed, registered essay companies with very professional-looking websites whose entire "business model" is only to rip off their customers in a dozen different ways, including by providing nothing, providing plagiarized material or material written by a totally inept writer, and/or by blackmailing their customers after initial transactions.

In my opinion, this entire forum, prospective customers who come here hoping to learn how to avoid getting ripped off -- and, ironically, each of your respective interests -- would be much better served if you both avoided self-serving rhetorical hyperbole that only ends up scaring prospective customers from using either legit freelance writers or legit companies altogether. As I've suggested many times, there's enough business out there for legitimate essay providers of both varieties to stop disparaging one another and to conduct themselves appropriately as members of the same community of legitimate essay providers and to limit their accusations and pejorative characterizations to the scam artists, some of whom operate as individual writers and some of whom operate as very professional-looking essay companies.

Well, it would appear that the threat of blackmail on the graduated student was just a smokescreen. He was just out to blackmail the student and never really had anything on him. He was using a psychological trick on the student, hoping he was weak enough to surrender to the perceived threat. It is at times like those that ES really comes in handy for the student. People like @Major and @Smiley73 helped to calm the nerves of the student and help the student realize that this was nothing more than unfounded blackmail. He never came back with an update so yeah, I do believe he was able to pushback properly against the blackmailer.

I guess it is because of situations like this that FLW decided to create a website for himself, even though he is an independent writer and did not really need that extra expense. Having a website makes the independent writer appear to be more of a legitimate business person and allows the student to gain some searchable information on the writer before hiring his services. While his website is pretty basic, I guess it gets the job done and allows him to gain a highly professional look among the clients considering his service.

I was doing just fine for years with nothing but my AOL email address, but I had to create my website in 2009 for one very specific reason caused by one specific person:

Back then, the most prolific poster on this forum was (quite obviously) one of the owners (or principals) of the essay company for which at least three or four other forum users and I had all been writing for many years. I believe that person was a male who represented himself here as a female, probably as part of his attempt to conceal his identity and self-interested motives for patrolling this forum 24/7/365, while pretending his only purpose was to be an "industry watchdog" for the benefit of students. The reason that we originally signed up here in the first place was at the specific request of one of that company's CS reps, who asked their best (meaning their most requested) writers to help address a malicious and totally untrue public accusation about that company. All of us also happened to use forum IDs here that were identical to our company writer IDs; so, the person who created a whole thread about "deceptive" writers using emails instead of websites knew exactly who each of us was, as well as what our email addresses were at the time. Most importantly, he also knew, full well, that we were all totally legitimate writers whose essays he was selling and that we were the best writers at that company at the time that he decided to create that thread, essentially, warning customers never to trust any independent writers who used their email addresses for independent work.

https://essayscam.org/forum/es/emails-deceptive-anonymous-writers-gmail-yahoo-826/2/

That company owner/principal who posted here clearly believed that none of us had any right to accept clients from this forum, even if they weren't already company customers, and would routinely threaten to get us fired for various things we posted here, all while simultaneously denying any direct association with the company that employed us. He even got one of their CS reps to contact me about taking customers from this forum, to which I responded by asking how it was any of their business where I found private clients if they didn't own or run this forum, which pretty much ended that exchange.

One day, as part of his continuous but lower-key attempts to steer all customers away from any independent writers, this person created that new thread to announce that no customer should ever trust any "deceptive" writer who used an email address instead of a website, and without ever acknowledging that there were definitely some totally legitimate writers who used only our emails, which he absolutely knew was true, because his own company was simultaneously selling the many essays written by us, and under the same company-writer IDs as our forum IDs, here. I believe that this was actually a deliberate attempt to try to steer potential customers away from us, specifically, because he believed that we were "stealing" customers from his company just by advertising our independent services here.

That's why I had to create my own website.