For a good, experienced writer, there really are relatively few areas in which we cannot write some projects very well. Rather than being an all-or-none issue, it's much more a matter of the level involved. I recently had to decline a Pharmacy PhD dissertation project, because it would have required a very high level of expertise with the material; but I've written several Pharmacy and Pharmacology projects at lower levels. I"ll see if I can get permission from one of those clients to post an old project.

I've had more Nursing clients than students in any other field, starting with my very first client 25 years ago, precisely because most of the written assignments with which they're continuously bombarded are almost completely unrelated to anything they actually need to know or to be able to do as nurses. Many of them definitely can't write well enough to do their written assignments, and many of those who can are already earning decent money working as nurses while pursuing more advanced degrees; so they just don't have the time to write essays, and it's worth it to them to just pay for a writer instead of trying to write them. They'd much rather spend their free time with their families and limit their schoolwork time to studying for their exams.

It's been 16 years, for me.

That about sums up what AI programs produce for academic essays.

Students who immediately jumped on the AI bandwagon last year, hoping it could replace the work of good freelance writers, quickly discovered, at their own expense, that AI essays are useless unless professors (literally) don't even bother to read their essays, which is occasionally the case, particularly at very non-competitive schools. However, most college professors do read their students' essays and routinely give AI essays grades of F, D, and C-, precisely because AI essays usually don't address essay prompts in any substantive way, at all.

Just ignore the trolls.

That "Example MBA Program Essay" in Post #3 is actually a perfect example of how not to write an application essay if you have any hope of being admitted to an MBA program. The last thing that evaluators of applications want to read is essays consisting of entire paragraphs of word salad that say absolutely nothing concrete to address the specific questions in the essay prompt. Sometimes, when clients send me drafts of their application essays to "edit," I have to tell them that based on my experience after having written hundreds of these, their drafts will not support the kind of essay that can strengthen their candidacy; and very few of those essays are as devoid of any real content as this "example." Hopefully, nobody ever commissioned that writer for an application essay.

Nice to see you back here, Meo. Hopefully, you'll be sticking around.

I'm sorry, but as a highly experienced professional NES writer who is, himself, a grammarian who also understands punctuation in my native language, I really don't need anybody else to proofread my work for me, particularly when I have fulfilled that very function at a high professional level, such as within my formal core duties as a Writer/Editor at a Federal Government agency. Certainly, I always do need to allow sufficient time for a "cold read" to proofread my own work in between completing my projects and delivering them, but the last thing I need is someone else to handle that very simple task for me. The same is likely the case for any other good NES writer with comparable skills and experience writing and proofreading other people's writing for a living.

This is a strawman argument. Nobody ever suggested that being a NES is the only requirement to being a good writer. Obviously, plenty of native speakers can't write very well. Native fluency is a necessary but insufficient condition to being a good academic writer in any language for native-language clients.

Typically, the people who create these types of threads here probably have never actually written anything for any clients; they probably haven't ever written for any essay companies, either. They're usually just "entrepreneurs" whose only real "idea" is hoping to start a new venture that will generate "passive" income, by employing real writers to work for them while functioning, exclusively, as a middleman taking a 50% cut (or more) of the payments on projects. They probably do the exact same thing on forums in all sorts of other industries in which they've never actually worked, as well.

That's because any writer (of hundreds) at an essay company can take projects off the assignment board. Your results always depend on which writer happened to take the project. Sometimes, it might be one of their best and most experienced writers; other times, it's one of their worst writers or a writer with no more experience than the customer and who just signed up hoping to try writing a few essays for extra cash while looking for a fulltime job. Some of those new writers are totally incompetent and will get fired as soon as their first customers complain and/or whose first essays turn out to be heavily plagiarized.


Typically, there's no middleman in the communications between customers and writers at essay companies; they communicate through a system that anonymizes both participants, mainly to prevent customers and writers from exchanging info to start making their own deals outside of the company. However, the content of messages is relayed back and forth intact and without any input from anybody in the middle. Essay-company admin doesn't even monitor those messages unless there's a specific issue or dispute requiring intervention. Generally, they rely on automated processes to detect and reject (or flag) any messages that include email addresses and phone numbers, just to make sure that customers and writers don't try to circumvent the system to do business privately.

Producing high-quality academic projects is a lot harder than the relatively simple task of coming up with coherent, well-written website copy. If an essay company can't even do the latter, it definitely can't do the former.

I've never understood why anybody doing his own writing would need a plagiarism scanner, because nobody ever copies the exact language from any source by "accident"; copying and pasting from sources is always a deliberate act.

Your best and safest bet is always to choose the best NES writer you can possibly find, because a good writer can always tone down his style to lower NES levels, as well as to ESL levels, by simple request. Conversely, a mediocre (or even worse) writer (or an ESL writer) can't ever write anything at a higher level than his own best writing. Most ESL clients simply let me know that they're ESL and that they'd prefer me to avoid overly complex sentences and/or advanced vocabulary.

However, I've also encountered plenty of exceptions to that general rule, because some ESL clients specifically want their paid projects to be much better than their own best writing. I think I've mentioned this before, but I had one long-term ESL client, in particular, whose English was definitely on the lower end of the ESL proficiency spectrum, but who always included the following request in all of his orders, starting with his very first project with me, initially, as his response to my asking whether he wanted me to tone down the level of complexity and vocabulary to better match his own English level: "I am an ESL student, but please write this at the highest and most complex possible level and use the most advanced possible vocabulary." So, if you're working with an experienced and good writer, all clients need to do is provide clear instructions about whatever level of writing is desired.

No doubt they should all be locked up. The problem is that in 3rd and 2nd-World countries, the justice systems are very unreliable, especially for these types of crimes. Even more importantly, if you do business with anybody anonymously, even 1st-World justice systems can offer only very limited assistance, unless the person's ID is easily ascertainable. Conversely, if you do business only with someone who discloses his real ID to you and who is located in any 1st-World country, blackmail is completely impossible to perpetrate successfully without being prosecuted as soon as it's reported to law-enforcement authorities. Nobody whose real ID and location you know could ever attempt to blackmail or extort money from you because of the obvious consequences of your reporting it.

Any contact from any purported "law enforcement" entity, whether in the US or the UK, is always completely fabricated by blackmailers. However, it is never the case that any UK university would ever contact any law enforcement entity (or vice-versa) in connection with suspected cheating by students, because law enforcement does not investigate students suspected (by their academic institutions) of academic dishonesty. In fact, as I've explained before, the Skills and Post-16 Guidance published by the UK Government makes it explicitly clear that the law will never be used to criminalize the actions of students, because academic dishonesty is considered, exclusively, to be a matter strictly between academic institutions and their students and not any kind of criminal offense:

Will this new legislation criminalise students who use these services?
"No. The offence is intended to target those providing essay mills commercially - it will not
criminalise students who have used or are using these services. Though the students'
actions do still constitute cheating this is a matter for the institution they are enrolled at to
address. The Department for Education has been working closely with the Ministry of
Justice (MoJ) and the CPS to ensure that students that use essay mills are excluded
from any liability by virtue of this legislation." (p.58)

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/619d1516e90e0704439f41c7/Skills_and_Post-16_Education_Bill_November_2021_policy_notes.pdf

I'm amazed that you'd continue posting all these details publicly instead of simply using the search function here, because just about every question and concern you could possibly have -- including questions about these exact types of obviously fake correspondence -- have been addressed in detail many times. If you want your blackmailer to go away and leave you alone, you shouldn't publicly admit to being "scared," either, because that's all they need to hear to have a reason to continue bothering and threatening you.

@Mirax1: He ended up using me for his 4,500-wd project, but, as I said in the other thread in which you posted, it's probably not in your (or his) best interests to continue discussing the details of your situation on any public forum. You already did the right thing by posting the blackmailer's website and email to warn other potential victims, but you should continue any further discussion of the details more privately. However, that's probably not even necessary, because if you just use the search function here for the word "blackmail," first, chances are very good that any possible question or concern of yours has already been addressed many times, and in quite a bit of detail in numerous old threads. Briefly, just ignore any and all future attempts at communication from him, block him on every medium through which he contacts you, don't even consider paying any ransom or (especially) confessing to your institution and/or asking them for assistance, and report the incident using the appropriate link provided in those other threads to US or UK law enforcement authorities, as appropriate.

Admin: Why does the quote function not work?

In my experience as an essay-company writer sometimes taking projects consisting of rewriting or entirely redoing projects originally provided by bad (usually ESL) writers. The one thing that they often did correctly was format essays and cite sources in the requested citation style, all while actually saying absolutely nothing or almost nothing substantive (let alone original and/or analytical) on the essay topic. Bad academic writers (including many students who write their own essays), often actually correctly format them to "look" like a good essay, as long as you don't read them, because they're entirely devoid of any substantive content. I'd imagine that AI programs do this, too, much the same way that Jack Nicholson (as Jack Torrence, in The Shining, 1980) was discovered by his horrified wife to have typed up hundreds of perfectly formatted book pages whose content was just one sentence ("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy") repeated thousands of times in pages that looked good, as long as you didn't read any of the content.

The American approach to college education has been flawed for decades, because, starting about 50 years ago, getting a college diploma (in anything) became viewed as a necessity, irrespective of whether or not students actually have any real interest in any field that specifically requires a degree. That's why so many kids enter college with absolutely no idea what they want to study and why they end up with degrees that are all but useless to them, since very few Sociology or History or Philosophy majors ever become sociologists, historians, or philosophers. They don't really have much of a choice, either, because, nowadays, they probably can't even compete for entry-level positions in retail sales (for just one example) without a college degree if all of the other applicants for the same position are college graduates.

The suggestion to use only writers you actually know personally just isn't realistic or practical. Instead, use writers whose long-term history (such as on this forum) can be reviewed and who are willing to share their real ID info that you can check and confirm independently.

While I agree that there are many advantages to using independent freelance writers, price isn't one of them. In my (extensive) experience as a writer who started writing for essay companies and then made the gradual transition to complete independence, I have known about half a dozen other writers who did the same thing, most of whom used to post here, too. Most of them were the other top writers at some of the same essay companies, where we knew one another, mainly, by virtue of all of the projects posted with specific requests for us. None of them ever charged less than what the essay companies for which we wrote charged for our work, because the prices charged by legitimate companies weren't unfair to customers; we just wanted to get rid of the middleman so that we received every penny of the market rate for our work instead of only about 50%.

The main advantage, by far, of using an independent freelance writer instead of (even a legitimate) essay company is simply that the quality of your essay never depends on which writer (of hundreds) happens to take your essay off the assignment board, because even the best legitimate essay companies always have some writers who are much better and much more experienced than almost all of their other writers. Despite all the marketing BS from some essay companies about how great all of their writers are, how high their hiring standards are, and (especially) that all projects are "assigned" to a specific writer with a degree in the exact same field as every project, none of that is even remotely true. The truth is that every essay company has some writers who just started doing this for the first time (some of whom get fired for incompetence and/or plagiarism almost immediately), and every (good) writer at every essay company routinely does projects in dozens of academic fields, with great results. Instead, what happens is that all available projects simply get posted, (and usually, automatically), on a secure project board to which hundreds of writers have access, regardless of their particular "degrees" and/or whether they're about to write their very first essay for the company after just getting hired yesterday, or their thousandth essay, after writing for the company for years. The same goes for any marketing BS about customers always being able to specify their choice of writer, because aside from notifying us that we have a request, essay companies can't require any of us to take any project that we choose to ignore, and the best writers usually ignore many requests for us, for various reasons. Finally, independent freelance writers never want to let down clients (or lose the future work of new clients); so, we'll often bend over backwards to fit projects in from private clients in ways that we never did for company projects that weren't convenient for us.

The other two main advantages of using independent freelance writers are that the legitimate and honest ones will provide their direct contact information for you to communicate with them directly instead of through an anonymizing system expressly designed to prevent direct communication between customers and their writers, and that, even when they're writing both company projects and their own clients' projects, writers always prioritize our private clients' work in every respect, simply because it's always our personal reputations on the line and because long-term client retention is so much more important to us than client retention for any company is to its writers.

This is a perfect example of why high-end websites don't necessarily mean anything about the quality of the product. The English on the site is much better than it is on many very nice "looking" websites with terrible reputations, which only makes it that much more dangerous to inexperienced customers, if the work they provide is equally unreliable or unusable. Based on my quick look at some of their "samples," they're very similar to the essay excerpts posted in this thread by the OP.

I just checked the website of the essay company for which I did the most work from 2003-2013 before becoming completely independent; they still have 350 of my old essays listed for sale.

Generally, the addresses displayed on essay company websites are either fake or nothing more than a P.O. box. The phone numbers are also fake more often than not, either ringing endlessly or just playing a recorded message when you try to call them. Sometimes, when you do a reverse number search, you'll find that their phone numbers are associated with completely different entities in the city where the essay company claims to be located and that have nothing to do with any essay services; other times, they're nothing more than 800 numbers leased by foreign entities that aren't even located in the same country as the address posted on the website. Always verify the street address and local phone number on any company website instead of assuming that they actually provide a real means of contacting them. Only trust companies and writers whose real names and addresses can be confirmed independently. If a writer isn't referred to you by someone you trust, ask him for his real name, address, and phone number, and then use local directories to confirm that the information supplied is real. If necessary, call the writer at the number provided to make sure that you're dealing with a real person and someone whose primary language is English. While there are plenty of good reasons for writers not to post that info on their websites, there's no justification for refusing to divulge their identity privately to prospective clients upon request. Never trust any writer who won't provide his info on request.

The OP's story provides yet another example of why paying a ransom is never the right response to being blackmailed. To protect yourself from any possibility of blackmail, only do business with writers who are willing to provide their real names and locations, and always confirm whatever info they provide, independently.

This thread provides a perfect example of why the only thing that's actually guaranteed by a blanket "money back guarantee" on an essay company website is that you're dealing with a scam.

There are dozen different threads here detailing the disappointment of customers who tried that company while it was operating under that name:

essayscam.org/forum/index.php?phrase=dissertation-service&searchType=3&where=0&forum=&posterName=&action=search&searchGo=1

There are several old threads about the company, including this one that provided an animated video of that OP's experience using them:

https://essayscam.org/forum/es/essayshark-con-artists-review-scammed-student-video-4326/

Obviously, it does, because what the Act actually says is "It is an offence for a person to provide..." You're confusing the language in the Act, itself, and the language in the UK Government's guidance document, to which I posted a link in Post # 15 above, which refers only to "essay mills." My point was that the only criminal liability under the Act applies to providers of essays and not to students or anybody else who purchases academic essays.

Prior to 2007, most customers of essay companies bought pre-written essays and far fewer chose to pay more for original custom-written essays. As soon as Turnitin and other plagiarism scanners became available and popular among professors, pre-written essays became almost worthless and business skyrocketed for original custom writing. I really don't think it had anything to do with how old the pre-written essays were, because students who purchased those essays, whether with the intention of submitting them for credit, or even just to learn how to write an essay wouldn't care that they were more than 5 years old. If they were planning on submitting them for credit, they wouldn't have had any reason to refrain from simply "changing" the dates on the sources or replacing them with newer sources; and students hoping to use them to learn how to write their own essays wouldn't have had the slightest concern about the dates on any sources, because that had nothing to do with whether or not those essays were models worth emulating in their own essays.

Turnitin was, essentially, the one thing that immediately made it possible for good writers to make a fulltime living writing academic essays, because it made pre-written essays worthless, almost overnight in 2007. Fifteen years later, ChatGPT killed off many essay companies and all but the very best and busiest freelance writers who had a sufficiently large regular client base to have sustained us while many students just needed to find out, firsthand, how bad and unreliable AI programs really are for academic essays.

There's really no such thing as a "specialized" academic writer and the notion that writers can only produce good essays in the same exact field(s) as their own degrees is patently ridiculous. I wouldn't believe any essay company that represents that every project is written by a writer with a degree in the same field as the project, because that's 100% marketing BS. Every undergraduate writes essays in many courses outside of his own particular major course of study; and, unlike professional academic writers, college students haven't already written thousands of undergraduate essays and/or hundreds of undergraduate essays in Psychology, or Sociology, or History, or Political Science, or Philosophy when they get their first essay assignment in any of those course, and they're expected to write essays in every one of those areas in which they take a course. If a college freshman is capable of writing essays in a dozen or more different academic areas, so can anybody who has been writing college essays for years, or for decades, such as in the case of very experienced academic writers. Likewise, if some college undergrads can write "A" papers in multiple academic areas, so can a good professional academic writer, especially a good academic writer who has been writing essays in all of those areas longer than most college undergrads have been alive. Certainly, we writers develop preferences for some areas over others, but those preferences don't necessarily correspond to our own degree areas. For just one example, some of us have become extremely good at writing Nursing essays, because we've written (literally) a thousand or more of them, (and kept all of our Nursing clients for many years), despite never having taken a single Nursing course, ourselves. Honest writers simply let clients know what our confidence level is with any project and we decline projects if we don't think we can write them at the level requested.

The use of essay mills absolutely is not a violation of the above-referenced law, because it doesn't apply to students, at all; it only criminalizes the furnishing of academic essays by essay providers. In fact, the UK Government could not possibly have made it more explicitly clear that students using illegal essay mills are completely excluded from any related liability, which it addressed quite directly in its own policy guidance at the time the law was first proposed in 2022. So, unless you're a provider of academic essays, that law doesn't apply to you in any way, shape, or form.

Here's exactly what that policy guidance says on p. 58:

"Will this new legislation criminalise students who use these services? No. The offence is intended to target those providing essay mills commercially - it will not criminalise students who have used or are using these services. ... The Department for Education has been working closely with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the CPS to ensure that students that use essay mills are excluded from any liability by virtue of this legislation."

No need to take my word for any of this, either, because you can just check the policy guidance, yourself.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/619d1516e90e0704439f41c7/Skills_and_Post-16_Education_Bill_November_2021_policy_notes.pdf

I still get regular unsolicited emails from Kenyans asking about working "for" or "with" me. When I used to respond by politely thanking them for their interest but informing them that I work alone, that I'm not an employer, and that I'm not looking for any help, but wishing them the best of luck, that would invariably lead to follow-up emails from them sending me resumes and writing samples and begging me to just give them a chance to work for me. That's why I no longer even bother responding; instead, I just hit the spam button to delete and block any future emails from them.

It's obviously because (domestic) essay companies are at least identifiable to local authorties, whereas unqualified or scam writers, and those intending to perpetrate blackmail always absolutely refuse to disclose their real identities to their clients. That's why nobody should ever use any writer who insists on remaining anonymous. Legitimate writers have no reason to refuse to share their names and addresses with their clients, on request. Ideally, that information should also be capable of being verified independently by clients, such as through local directories and/or any cheap ID-verification service.

Blackmail is only possible behind the cloak of anonymity; so any writer who deliberately refuses to provide his info to prospective clients on their request should immediately be suspect. That doesn't mean writers actually need to publish their private information on their public websites for anybody and everybody (including scammers) to see; but they should always be willing to share it with prospective clients once they indicate that they are serious about ordering a project after preliminary discussion, such as about whether the writer can take the project with confidence and that the price range involved is within the budget of the client. Writers who refuse to do that obviously have something to hide and should never be trusted.

While you don't have to worry about AI writing getting flagged for traditional "plagiarism," for reasons I've explained in other recent threads, I don't believe there's really any way to "rewrite" AI essays to produce a good academic essay. You can't rewrite an essay that says nothing (or almost nothing) substantive without actually doing all the research from scratch, even if it says nothing (or almost nothing) in (mostly) correct grammar and sentence structure. That's also how professors recognize AI writing.

There are scanners that are intended to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by AI or written by a human writer. My understanding is that they're extremely unreliable because they're often wrong. However, they're totally different from traditional plagiarism scanners, which are useless for that purpose, because plagiarism scanners are designed to identify copied strings of text by matching them to the sources from which they were copied. Since AI programs don't actually copy existing text, plagiarism scanners are useless to identify AI writing vs. human writing.

Most professors recognize AI writing, precisely because of the combination of technically good "writing" and the glaring total absence of any substance and/or by obvious deflection away from any essay prompt that requires analysis and toward historical fluff. Generally, students who write as well as an AI program also express coherent thought in their essays. In fact, AI writing is so obvious to professors because it the exact obvious of the real pattern exhibited by human students: Specifically, students are almost always worse at writing than at substantive learning.

As I've explained several times, AI doesn't plagiarize in the simplest, most obvious traditional sense, because AI programs don't actually copy and past verbatim content, which is what plagiarism scanners are designed to detect. AI programs frequently lift ideas from sources without crediting those sources, including totally inappropriate sources, such as amateur blogs and grade-school textbooks, and they also fabricate non-existent "sources" and content, which is known as AI "hallucination." However, when AI programs do lift information from uncredited sources, they still "rewrite" it in different words, which makes it original "writing" that inoculates it against detection by traditional plagiarism scanners. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has explained that the phenomenon of AI hallucination is attributable to the fact that AI programs don't yet have the ability to respond appropriately when prompted for information that they can't find. Instead of, essentially, admitting that they don't have any relevant information, AI programs fabricate information, instead.