When it comes to academic writing, the problem with AI isn't that it doesn't sound enough like a human writer. The problem is that it sounds almost exactly like a horrible human writer who is just trying to BS by filling the entire essay with words just to satisfy a mandatory word count but without actually generating anything substantive about the topic, especially to the extent the topic requires any kind of original analysis. Academic AI writing sounds a lot like an old cartoon that one of my freshman college professors handed out about how not to write our first essays; it was a fictional response to an essay prompt requiring 500 words about the Industrial Revolution: "The Industrial Revolution was very industrial. It was also extremely revolutionary. Because the Industrial revolution was so industrial and revolutionary, it had a very great impact on everyone who was caught up in it..." That's about what students can expect from AI programs.

I disagree. As soon as students discover how bad AI writing really is, they need excellent human writing just as much as they used to and it's no less valuable to them than it used to be. Meanwhile, those still hoping to get free work through AI aren't even in the market for human writing again (yet), regardless of any price reduction. .

I don't know anything about the company, but, in general, companies that provide horrible work stay in business by emphasizing aggressive advertising through social media and flashy websites to lure in an endless supply of first-time/last-time disappointed customers. Legitimate companies and writers who provide the good work that their customers are hoping to find rely on the quality of their work to turn every new customer into a a regular long-term client. It's a totally different business model.

I've never known any legitimate writer who accepts payment after writing anything. At best, you're dealing with someone who is trying to write for a living for the first time and very desperate to establish his very first clients. At worst, you're setting yourself up for blackmail and extortion when you refuse to pay because the work you receive is absolute garbage and completely useless to you.

This is exactly why nobody should ever trust any company based on website promises of a "100% Satisfaction/Refund Guarantee." No legitimate essay provider would ever make such a promise and no provider issuing such a guarantee will ever actually refund a project when you try to request a refund. It sounds too good to be true, precisely because it is.

There's no such thing as any "on-site" academic essay companies and, quite frankly, I don't believe anybody who claims ever to have found clients by distributing "flyers" on any college campus, at least not in the last 40 years. Paying cash to some stranger in a car would be much riskier than trusting someone online whose website and reputation can at least be checked and whose real ID info can be verified prior to the transaction. Even if someone did distribute flyers on a college campus, the idea that students immediately rushed out to meet the writer in his parked car, and with their friends, no less, sounds laughably stupid to me, for about a half a dozen different very obvious reasons. Even 40 years ago, any such "flyers" would have simply provided a phone number, not some street near the campus where a writer supposedly parked his car waiting for students to meet him an hour (or whatever) after distribution. What would such a flyer even say? "Meet me at my white Toyota on the corner of 12th and Main Street between Noon and 2:00 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays"? The first time I ever took a project from an essay company was in the early 1990s, and at that time, the company faxed me the project materials and then the same guy who'd talked to me on the phone met me in person (at a 24-hour gym on 17th Street) to pick up the hard copy of the completed project, and he paid me in cash. They advertised in newspaper classified ads, at the time, for both customers and for writers. I still remember the project topic: it was an analysis of Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man.

If you never submitted the work for academic credit, there's absolutely nothing you have to worry about, even if they do manage to contact anybody at your university who cares about their allegations, which is highly doubtful, in the first place.

Either way, and this applies equally to anybody who did actually submit ghostwritten work for credit, the only thing anybody should ever do in response to any form of blackmail is immediately block every means by which they've contacted you and don't respond to anything, regardless of what they say, or what threats they make, or whatever "emails" or other "documentation" they send you about anything. Don't even open their messages. Just delete anything from them and block them, immediately.

I don't know anything about the company, but paying someone to take the LSAT for you is a really bad idea. Nothing provides a more accurate measure of whether or not someone has the ability to be able to get through law school than your (real) LSAT score. If you can't get a decent LSAT score on your own, the last thing you want to do is get accepted based on an LSAT score achieved by someone else. It's not like most typical academic essays that don't actually measure your ability to learn the course material and prepare to do well on the exams, or be successful in your career choice, because most professional fields don't actually require much (if any) academic research or writing skills, in the first place. (The same is substantially true for Journalism majors, unless it's strictly a matter of sparing your time vs. lack of aptitude for the field.)

Conversely, if you do manage to get accepted into law school without the aptitude specificaly measured by LSAT scores, you're probably just going to flunk out in your first very miserable year while also incurring a loan debt to pay for it. I had a very easy time in law shool, largely because I scored in the 90th LSAT percentile, and even that probably underestimated my actual ability, because I had a nearly perfect score on 3 of 4 sections (the way the LSAT was formulated back then) and almost all of the points that I lost on the entire exam were in the one section (Symbolic Logic/Logical Games) that relates the least toward one's overall aptitude for law school. If you can't achieve your own very high score on the other sections (Analytical Logical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Analysis of Facts), law school really isn't for you, even if you do manage to get yourself accepted by cheating on the LSAT. Just take the GMAT and get into an MBA program, instead, because, unlike law school, success in that program is much more related to the skills and abilities that allowed you to achieve a high undergraduate GPA vs. your innate aptitude for a very specific way of thinking, irrespective of your (presumably) high undergraduate GPA.

There are both fraudulent scams and reliable legitimate service providers in almost every industry. With no more than the most basic Internet search skills and a little common sense, it shouldn't be too difficult to identify and distinguish them in this industry. After that, just avoid any provider who isn't willing to disclose his real ID and location, and then confirm that information independently.

It should be incredibly obvious that it really couldn't matter less how "clear" or "detailed" the wording of the refund policy is, because if the company is a scam in the first place, they're not going to honor any refund request for any reason. Much more often than not, just the fact that an essay company promises unconditional "refunds" is enough evidence that the company is a scam; the same goes for those "free unlimited revision" and/or "satisfaction" guarantees. Legitimate essay companies and writers rarely have to issue refunds, because they provide good work. When they do get a cancellation request shortly after payment or they have to issue a refund because they encounter some major unanticipated problem with a project that makes a refund appropriate, they simply click the "refund" option on whatever payment system the client used to issue the payment and then that payment system handles it. Sellers and service providers don't usually have any control over how long that takes after they submit the refund request to the system; the only thing they can do is initiate the refund process.

Generally, the more an essay company highlights "refunds" and "satisfaction guarantees" and/or "free unlimited revisions" in the first place, the more likely it is that the company is a scam and won't actually be issuing any refunds (or providing worthwhile revisions) for any reason, regardless of how "clearly" or how "detailed" those promises are represented on its website. Legitimate service providers never promise unconditional refunds or unlimited revisions; only scam companies do that, as a means to gain the confidence of customers, which is the exact origin of the phrases "conman" and "con job." Just read some of the threads on this forum posted by customers who were ripped off and/or threatened and blackmailed after simply trying to hold a company to the exact refund (or revision) terms very clearly detailed on its website. Just about all of them included very specific guarantess that should have been obvious red flags, precisely because they're too good to be true.

Many of my clients have used an entirely different 3-step process:

Step 1. Submit essay prompt to ChatGPT.
Step 2. Discover that AI essays consist of useless content devoid of substantive analysis and references to non-authoritative, inappropriate, and fabricated "sources."
Step 3. Contact the same human writer they used before for good original essays with substantive analysis and references to real, authoritative, appropriate sources.

Agreed. Whenever you order from any essay company, you have no idea which writer will take the order, or whether it's someone who has already written thousands of great essays over many years or someone who (literally) got hired yesterday and who is just trying this out for the first time as a "side gig." You won't know anything about the company writer besides whatever info some companies list on their writers' profiles, and the writer is always anonymous to you, by specific design, with all messages passing through the company system before being relayed back and forth only after first being totally anonymized. You have no way of knowing how much of the information on the writer's company profile is true, either. Even if you get lucky the first time and you request the same writer next time, no company writer is ever required to take any subsequent order, because requiring them to take specific orders would immediately and directly contradict their status as independent contractors and go a long way toward establishing that they're employees, which is the very last thing that any American essay company wants, because, among other things, they'd be responsible for withholding federal taxes and for providing them with employee health insurance. Using anonymous independent writers is also risky, because legitimate honest writers who actually provide nothing but the good work that all of their clients have the right to expect have no reason to refuse to provide their real (verifiable) ID info to prospective clients, on request. Eliminating anonymity anytime you deal with anybody in this industry is probably the single best protection there is against all of the worst risks associated with trusting strangers in remote online transactions, such as being scammed outright, receiving unusable amateurish writing no better than your own, and, of course, blackmail and extortion.

First, honest writers always provide entirely original work; that's how one earns clients' trust and establishes a roster of long-term repeat clients. Second, it's actually AI programs that are, by definition, incapable of doing anything besides plagiarizing each and every idea in each and every AI-generated essay. Third, whether an essay is written by a human writer or generated by AI programs, it's impossible ever to "clean it up" or "make it original" if all of the ideas in the essay are still those of whomever wrote the essay or source authors whose ideas were plagiarized by AI programs that harvested those ideas without ever referencing their original sources. At least with an honest human writer, the ideas in the essay are always original.

By contrast, AI programs, at best, can only regurgitate the ideas of others; at worst, they cite completely fabricated sources that don't even exist, often "creating" sources, by combining parts of the titles of multiple sources and representing them as having come from books or journals that might be real, but that never actually published any such article. That's because AI programs often simply harvest portions of unrelated journal, book, and totally non-authoritative blog titles the exact same way that they harvest their substantive ideas. Fourth, if plagiarism is really the concern, it's still 100% plagiarized, even if students rewrite every sentence of the essay, because the ideas expressed originally came from an uncredited source. "Rewriting" the essay (well) will usually allow it to pass a simple plagiarism scanner that only flags similar strings of words, but all of the ideas are still plagiarized, regardless of how they might be rephrased using different words. At least a (good) essay provided by an honest human writer typically represents all-original ideas, whereas AI programs (at best) necessarily rely entirely on unoriginal and uncredited ideas plagiarized from real sources and/or "cited" from nonexistent sources that are entirely fabricated, even when the writing, itself, isn't necessarily atrociously bad, which it often is, as well.

AI programs can't produce anything even remotely close to the quality of a (good) human writer. To safeguard yourself from any risk of blackmail, simply avoid ever doing business with any writer who isn't willing to disclose his full name and address upon request, and always confirm that information independently, such as through local directories, or, if necessary, by calling the writer -- ideally, on a landline -- just to make sure you really know whom you're dealing with, because blackmail is entirely impossible without anonymity. Also understand that essay companies can't ever really know, let alone control, what their writers actually do with any of the work that they produce for their customers after they upload the work into the company system. Regardless of what a company's "policy" is, any of their writers could immediately resell essays privately, and there's been at least one report, right on this forum, about an essay-company writer blackmailing a company customer by exploiting some of the information the customer inadvertently provided in conjunction with the order.

The only thing even more annoying than websites with constant ad pop-ups are websites with those constant "chat assistant" dialogue boxes that pop up every 15 seconds with offers to "help" you.

They're obviously not there to "help" you at all; their only function is to convert your initial site visit into a purchase by offering you "special discounts" that, supposedly, are only available if you place an order or make a purchase immediately.

This is nothing but a high-pressure sales tactic designed to convince you to commit to a purchase before you're ready to make that decision.

Those same "special discounts" will always still be available the next time you visit the site.

I usually just exit any page the very first time any chat box reappears after I close it once.

AI programs do not typically plagiarize any of the actual wording from sources. They always plagiarize the ideas of their sources, by design, simply because AI writing programs are (currently) incapable of original independent analysis. That's also why AI writing can't easily be detected by any automated scans the same way as copied/pasted writing. "Paraphrasing" AI writing doesn't cure it of plagiarism any more than does paraphrasing the written work of an uncredited human ghostwriter. Paraphrasing AI writing instead of submitting exactly what AI generates is merely a different type of plagiarism, and therefore, a complete waste of time and effort. Unless every idea in the essay is properly cited as (ChatGPT, 2024), it's still 100% plagiarized even if students rewrite every single word of it.

Some of my clients tried out AI and immediately realized that essays generated by AI are worthless, unless you happen to know that your professor doesn't even bother reading submitted projects.

Even the "best" AI tools are all but useless for anything that's supposed to reflect original thought and analysis.

I never worked for any company that required writers to "bid" on projects, or for that matter, ever used any kind of "bot" for anything, including 1,000+ eBay auctions in 24 years. However, it's ridiculous to suggest that a company writer who uses a bot to win the bidding process just to get the project is, therefore, also more likely to use "bots" to write the essay. The two things are (obviously) totally unrelated; so that makes about as much sense as suggesting that an eBay buyer who wins auctions by using bidding bots is, therefore, also more likely not to pay for the item afterwards or to return it, or that a driver who uses his vehicle's cruise control on the highway, or his GPS screen for directions instead of paper maps, is, therefore, also an irresponsible driver who shouldn't be trusted to drive on city streets. Customers couldn't (and shouldn't) care less what process writers use to win the company bidding process, internally, when they bid on available projects; all they care about is how the writer actually writes their essays. Producing a writing project by any means other than actually writing every word of it from scratch is a breach of clients' trust; using some kind of automated bidding bot just to compete against other company writers to get the project in the first place isn't a breach of clients' trust, because it's totally unrelated to how any writer actually writes projects.

Both legitimate and illegitimate providers typically post client testimonials and feedback on their websites. In the case of the former, they're real, and in the case of the latter, they're fake. One of the most obvious tip-offs that testimonials are totally fake are the ones that actually display the purported names and academic institutions of their satisfied customers, because no customer would ever allow himself or herself to be identified on an essay company's website, let alone with the name of the school posted there, as well.

AI always plagiarizes ideas, by design, because it has no basis for producing original substantive critical thought. It also pulls information from totally inappropriate, non-authoritative sources (such as blogs and grade-school-level websites), and often fabricates sources that don't even really exist. The only thing that AI produces that's often "original" is the actual wording of material, because it doesn't need to copy any strings of words. That's why traditional plagiarism scanners -- that only scan for strings of words that already exist in its database and/or online -- can't directly detect AI writing with any accuracy. However, human professors can easily recognize AI writing by it's near-complete absence of substantive content, repetition of points, irrelevant content, and the fact that AI essays are rampant with "fluff" padding in the form of light background information (throughout) instead of any kind of complex analysis or deep engagement with any source material. Perhaps the easiest way for professors to identify AI writing is simply to put their own essay prompts (and/or portions thereof) right into a few AI programs to generate essays that are almost identical to the AI essays submitted by their students.

There is no "law" anywhere in the US or UK that criminalizes the submission of ghostwritten essays by students. There are laws that criminalize the production and/or sale of academic essays, but those laws only criminalize the conduct of essay providers, and never the conduct of students. If anybody here really believes that he knows of any such "law" that criminalizes what students do with ghostwritten essays (or believes that he knows of any such "cases" anywhere), he should simply post links to those laws and/or to those cases right here.

I have never had a problem with ESL writers who are honest with their clients and don't pretend to be native speakers.

This is a perfect example of why it's completely meaningless that an essay company provides a phone number on its website. Typically, they're just leased 800 numbers that aren't actually linked to any real person or street address and they either ring endlessly or they have a perpetual automated answering service. More often than not, when companies do have someone actually answering their phones, that person's only role is to pretend to be a "customer service" rep while doing nothing besides working to gain the confidence of prospective customers by reassuring them that they can do their projects and promising to "assign" the "perfect expert" who has an advanced degree in whatever field corresponds to the customer's project inquiry. As described many times on this forum by customers who have been scammed by such companies, the tone of those reps always changes very dramatically as soon as the company has their hands on the customer's money and the customer complains, either about not having received the work by the deadline or, (much more commonly), about having received completely unusable garbage that obviously wasn't produced by any "expert" in any academic field. That's when the tone of those reps who sounded so incredibly nice and endlessly helpful when they were just working on gaining the confidence of their victims turns into quick hangups and, eventually, to overt threats, as soon as the customer mentions the company's "guarantees" of "unlimited revisions" and/or of a "100% refund guarantee." The only way that a phone number actually provides any real sense of security is when a writer divulges his real identity to prospective clients before payment and that name and phone number are both capable of being verified independently by the client to make sure they're real and that the number actually corresponds to the real name and location of the writer.

No legitimate essay company or writer ever accepts payment after writing any project. Payment after delivery is only offered by: (1) Scam companies who will use it as an excuse to perpetrate blackmail after sending you totally unusable garbage, (2) Scam middlemen looking to scam legit writers by commissioning them to write the project before payment and then never paying them if the customer does pay after delivery, and (3) Extremely desperate totally inexperienced brand new writers who don't yet have any clients or any other way to find clients and who are willing to take the risk of nonpayment just to get their very first clients. Payment for "half" up front doesn't work either, because the writer has no way to pursue payment for the other half after delivery. However, no legitimate writer would refuse to write and deliver a small (prepaid) section of any project, as long as whatever the writer is supposed to deliver is paid for in advance. New clients do this all the time, to see whether a writer is legitimate and whether his work is good before trusting him with a large prepaid project.

Anybody who has ever written for any large essay company knows that Nursing is probably the single academic field that generates the most orders, and more than just about any other field of study. That's probably because, for whatever reason, Nursing programs require much more writing than other programs, despite the fact that nurses don't do very much writing once they're actually working as nurses. I've written thousands of nursing projects since 2003 and everything from those dopey 150-word class forum posts to 50-page practicums and 100-page theses and dissertations. It's also, easily, the single academic field that has generated the most referrals for me, including both friends of my clients and even their children, sometimes a decade or more after the clients last used me. Nurses also seem to pursue higher degrees after they start working much more often than other professionals, which means that I've had quite a few nursing clients require my services for as long as a decade, from the time they started school all the way through their advanced degrees.

Another thing that's nearly unique about Nursing programs is the degree to which they require regular class forum posts, consisting of original posts and then series of numerous follow-up posts requiring every student to quote and respond to the posts of classmates. That has allowed me to read many hundreds of examples of how well other students in the same classes understand the material, as well as how well they're able to express themselves in written form. Frankly, most of their posts are barely responsive to the topic in any substantive way, often incoherent, and almost always written extremely poorly. Typical projects in Nursing ask students for nothing more "complex" than to pick a Nursing theorist of the student's choice and explain it; alternatively, they require selecting two Nursing theorists and a comparison of their respective approaches. Therefore, the notion that someone who writes academic essays for a living - even someone who wasn't ever a Writer/Editor for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services - wouldn't be able to write these projects, and much better than most degree candidates, is just silly.

Nowadays, my nursing clients typically provide PDF versions of their entire textbooks and all of their class materials. However, this wasn't as often the case 15 years ago. That's the only reason someone like me - who has never taken a single Nursing course, himself - would have so many Nursing textbooks on his bookshelf. (See linked photo.) In fact, Nursing projects are often so much easier for professional essay writers than other types of projects that they always get grabbed off the assignment boards within minutes of first being posted. Likewise, for relatively new writers in this industry who are gradually learning how to handle projects in many different academic fields, Nursing is one of the fields with which they quickly become most comfortable.

First, if you're dealing with a legitimate essay company in the first place, the fact that a new order might remain on the assignment board after 24 hours usually just means that their writers might consider it too difficult to justify taking it for the posted payout. If anything, it's probably a good thing that it doesn't get snatched up immediately, because, if nothing else, it might mean nothing more than that their writers don't grab any project to put out garbage. When I wrote for essay companies from 2003 through 2013, it was typical for difficult and complex projects to remain on the board for a while, until the company either increased the payout or contacted a few of its best writers to offer (only) us the project at a higher payout rate than posted.

Second, if you already made the mistake of paying a scam company, asking to cancel the order and return your money after payment is useless, because scammers and criminals never issue "refunds" for any reason. If you review the dozens of threads on this forum about blackmail, you'll find that many of those situations were precipitated, precisely, by requests to cancel projects before they were written. If you're dealing with a scam company, the only difference it makes to request a refund shortly after payment is the nonsensical "justification" they provide for their blackmail threats. Legitimate essay providers simply issue refunds in those situations, as long as they haven't actually started work on the project involved. Depending on when you request to cancel in relation to the order/payment date, and (much more importantly), the due date, you'll get a partial refund after a fair deduction for any work actually done on the project to date, along with whatever portion they already completed, because the customer rightfully owns whatever portion of the work the company has already completed and for which it has refused to cancel the fair portion of the payment associated with that completed work.

Exactly. Your best bet is always to use a specific person who is willing to divulge his full name and address that you can verify, for yourself, through independent means, to be certain that you're dealing with a real person.

Welcome to the forum, Stevos.

Those spoofed emails are always complete nonsense.


Exactly. Just think about it: If they already contacted your supervisor, why would they think you'd even consider still paying them? Even kidnappers don't kill their hostages first and then continue demanding a ransom. Never respond to blackmailers, regardless of what their messages say. Just block every means by which they continue to contact you. That's the quickest way to get them to leave you alone. Every response from you only motivates them to continue threatening you.

Unfortunately, your money is gone unless you paid by some method that allows disputing the transaction. Tell your daughter to ignore anything they say, immediately block every means by which they contact her without responding, and understand that everything they've told her so far about "meetings" (etc.) is laughably stupid. Just about every conceivable related question you could possibly ask has been answered here many times. Use the search function here for the term "blackmail," which generates all of the following threads: essayscam.org/forum/index.php?phrase=blackmail&action=search&searchGo=1

In the future, don't do business with any writer who is not willing to provide you with his or her real name and specific location, as well as with proof of same that you can verify yourself, independently. Blackmail without anonymity is entirely impossible without obvious prohibitive legal consequences, at least in nations with functional criminal justice systems. If you know the real identity of your writer, you can't possibly be blackmailed or extorted. Report any such instance to legal authorities, using the links provided in some of the threads referenced above.

Thankfully, she was at least honest about my writing.

It is absolutely not the case that any student anywhere has ever been "criminally charged" or "reported" to any academic institution by any UK government entity, notwithstanding the repeated false statements by two posters here to the contrary. That's because the legislation at issue expressly and quite clearly excludes students from any liability under that law. There is no such thing as any law in the UK "pertaining to the hiring of essay mills." The Skills and Post-16 Law to which you're referring pertains to running an essay mill and/or providing academic work for submission by others, not to the purchase of such work by students or by anybody else.

Anybody who believes otherwise should have no problem simply posting a link or any other relevant reference capable of being accessed by others to any report, anywhere, of such a criminal case or of any report of any student, anywhere, ever having been "reported" to any academic institution in connection with government enforcement action under any UK law taken against essay mills. It is unnecessary to engage in any kind of nasty argument, personal insults, or accusations, because anybody who claims that he knows of such cases against students should simply be able to provide the factual evidence to support his claim, and without being defensive about it.

This, right here, is a link to the official policy-notes guidance published by the UK Government about the legislation at the time that it was first proposed and whether it "pertains" to students, at all:

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

On page 58, that guidance explicitly provides the following statement in question-and-answer format:

"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."

Furthermore, and again, contrary to repeated statements of several posters on this forum, the legislation in question is utterly inapplicable and totally irrelevant, even to any essay company, except those actually physically located in England or Wales:

On page 57, that guidance provides the following statement, on that specific point:

"The Bill extends to England and Wales and applies in relation to England only. In practice, this means that the offences can be committed in England and Wales..."

Of course, students around the globe (hardly just in the UK) have managed, forever, to get themselves charged with violations of academic institutional ethics policies and institutional honor codes in various ways, such as by plagiarizing or by submitting suspiciously good work to professors who were already quite familiar with their writing abilities. None of that has anything to do with any criminal legislation, in general, or with the UK Skills and Post-16 Education Law, in particular. If anyone here believes otherwise, he should simply provide the source of his factual statement to the contrary to support his claim.

When I was still writing for essay companies before 2013, I found that the only way to grab the best projects before they were taken by other writers on a consistent basis was to keep a pc next to everywhere that I typically sat in every room of my apartment and to check for new orders constantly.

Luckily, some companies took my suggestion to add an audible notification signal indicating every new incoming order, so that I didn't constantly need to check the boards manually. Nowadays, company writers can use their phones to monitor assignment boards, but the fewer orders there are coming in, the more important it is to check constantly if you hope to grab any decent projects before they get taken by someone else within about a minute (or seconds) of being posted on essay-company assignment boards.

It's a shame that students seem to do their searches of companies only after having been ripped off rather than before, when they're making their decision to use them. In any case, it's not their own reviews that are the problem, because both legitimate and illegitimate providers typically post reviews on their sites. The real problem is that prospective customers trust their "money back guarantees" and "unlimited free revisions until satisfied," etc. There's no way to hold them to those "guarantees" unless they're physically located sufficiently close to make suing them in small claims court a realistic option. When the amounts invloved are very small and the cost of suing them quite large by comparison, there's really nothing you can do besides warn others not to make the same mistake.

"Somehow"? The one way that a writer can maintain a client base is by consistently providing high-quality work. If clients weren't thrilled with the work they already received from a writer, they'd never continue using the same writer. Obviously, the recent proliferation of AI writing programs makes it more difficult to build a new client base, but for good writers, it has had almost no lasting effect on their existing client base. In fact, when their clients experiment with AI for one project, they come right back to their trusted writer as soon as they're able to compare the AI essay to their other essays.

AI doesn't usually plagiarize in any way that can be detected by a scanner, because it doesn't need to copy anything verbatim. It does routinely plagiarize by re-wording the ideas in sources without citing them, but that form of plagiarism isn't capable of being detected by automated scanners. It also makes up novel information or "alternative facts" and sometimes it lists "sources" that are either completely fabricated or mixes of portions of plausible-sounding book and journal-article titles that seem to be related to the subject matter. Even when AI does cite real sources that exist, the material cited by AI doesn't actually come from those sources and can't be found in them when checked. Professors shouldn't even need any kind of automated scanner just to identify AI writing. All they really have to do is submit their own essay prompts (and/or sections therefrom) to a few AI writing programs to see what they generate. If they want to prevent their students from using AI, all they have to do is distribute AI-generated essays for the assignment along with the assignment prompt and tell their classes that there should be no similarity between their essays and those AI samples of the same assignment.

It's a moot point that almost doesn't matter, because you can never trust blackmailing criminals to stop blackmailing you and leave you alone after you pay them, anyway. At least one blackmail victim on this forum reported paying off their demands, only to receive additional demands for more money and the exact same threats, afterwards. Regardless of the meaningless details of different cases, it's always a mistake to pay them or to respond to any of their messages in the first place. They're most likely to leave you alone and focus on their latest new victims if you completely ignore (and immediately block) their attempts to contact you, whether it's the first time or the same criminals bothering you again years later.

Once you respond to any of their messages, they'll continue trying to bully you into paying; and human nature being what it is, they're much more likely to actually make the effort to hurt you to retaliate after the frustration of investing more of their time into communicating with you because your initial responses made it seem likely worth their time. Enable privacy controls over all of your public profiles to limit their ability to find you. Never respond to any blackmail demands at all. Immediately block every means by which they continue to try to reach you, and report them to the authorities: ic3.gov/Home/ComplaintChoice in the US and actionfraud.police.uk/how-to-report-fraud in the UK. Use only writers who provide you with their complete ID and address information on request (and enough related information to enable you to confirm their identity, independently), because blackmail is absolutely impossible without anonymity, especially for any writer living in a First-World country with a functional criminal justice system.

No. If you never submitted the work for credit, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. (If you're asking because some scam company or writer is threatening you with disclosure, you can safely ignore them completely. Don't respond at all and just block every means by which they continue to try to contact you.)

You have nothing to worry about (other than identity theft from the info you provided). Follow up with your credit card to dispute the charge and they'll probably close the card and issue a new one if you tell them what happened. Block every means by which they contact you and don't respond to anything from them, at all. Read all the other threads dealing with similar problems on the main page.