Unfortunately, it's too late for the OP, but for anybody else dealing with this kind of situation in the future, post #4 is exactly what you should do immediately after the very first demand or threat.

At least they admit to being located in the Philippines, which is relatively rare.

On what forum would that be, John? Because a quick search indicates that the topic of GED exams has been mentioned only once on this forum in almost 20 years.

This isn't cheating unless there's some explicit institutional agreement or directive prohibiting teachers from using AI to generate their exams, and in all likelihood, there probably isn't, because there's really no sensible rationale for any such prohibition. On the other hand, most teachers do expressly prohibit the use of AI on written assignments, which (obviously) makes AI cheating, by definition.

The best thing you (and anybody else in the same situation in the future) could do for the benefit of others would be to post here (just once) to identify the blackmailer by name and email, as well as the company that employs him. That helps others avoid becoming victims and it imposes some negative consequences on the blackmailer.

What you (and anybody else in the same situation in the future) should definitely not do is continue posting more details and asking for help, publicly, because your blackmailer probably reads this forum and will realize that you're frightened, which only emboldens him to continue threatening you. It's pretty easy for him to ID you by the details that you post in conjunction with the date that you post them in relation to your transaction with him. Just use the search function here (quietly and without posting additional questions or details, publicly) to find the many threads where I've already provided comprehensive answers to any conceivable blackmail-related question that you could possibly have. There's no question that you could ask that hasn't already been answered in great detail at least several times in previous threads with "blackmail" in the topic title.

In this situation, you have a little leverage to get him to leave you alone. So before you block every means by which he tries to contact you, tell him if he contacts you even once more, you'll immediately provide his company with all of the evidence of his poaching your business from them. Then block him and don't even read -- let alone respond to -- any additional contact from him. The stupidest possible thing you could ever do would be to involve your school in any way (or withdraw), for the exact same reason that you wouldn't hit yourself in the head with a baseball bat in response to a threat from someone else to crack your skull with a bat if you don't cough up some money. Before your fingers hit the keyboard to ask your next question, re-read the 2nd paragraph of this post, instead.

Frankly, I also factor in how much I want and need the particular project.

For students who just want to find qualified honest human writers, this forum still serves the same purpose that it always has.

If all of the companies that had a reason to prevent any public discussion about them left the business, that's probably a very good thing. Reliable providers who provide high-quality work have no reason to put themselves on the DND list; if anything, we only benefit from the comments of our clients.

This is an important point.

At least your experiences will help others avoid similar mistakes.

Already back in late 2012, the company for which I did the most work "reorganized" in a way that really did nothing more than re-categorize projects in a way that reduced the payout for the exact same work we'd been providing for years. I never even bothered to register on their new site and went completely independent a few months later.

In late 2025, I doubt that many people are still actually planning on becoming professional ghostwriters, for obvious reasons.

I believe SEO is still just as important today on various media platforms, such as on YouTube channels, etc.

Based just on reports and complaints on this forum, that appears to be the case much more often than not.

Students should know that the only way we can provide good advice about their particular situations is for them to include all the (non-self-identifying) details about their transactions; and the only way they can contribute to the purpose of this forum is to include the urls and/or names of the providers that failed to live up to reasonable expectations.

Social media platforms are also a customer's best bet to get scammed and blackmailed. The dumbest possible thing any student looking for a writer could do is trust anybody who contacts you, first, on any social media platform.

The longer that any provider has been doing business under the same name the less you ever have to worry about this kind of thing. Those of us who've built up our reputations for 20+ years would never take the risk associated with that kind of negative publicity just for a quick buck.

Ironically, all of the specific failures detailed here by the OP in connection with unqualified writers, way back in 2014, perfectly describes exactly what to expect in 2025 from the same essays generated by AI programs.

Many of my clients are actually very good students who just hate writing.

I've always disagreed with the suggestion that scanning your own essay prior to submission exposes you to any kind of plagiarism accusations. Nothing about that has changed now that scanning can be done through AI instead of through traditional scanners. First, traditional scanners have always stored anything scanned for various future uses; so the fact that scanning can now be done with AI programs is a total non-issue, IMO. Second, unless you're talking about PhD dissertations (which can sometimes be developed into professional journal articles or books), almost no academic projects have any value (to their original creators) once submitted for credit and graded. Third, and most importantly, who cares that other students might submit the same project sometime after you've already submitted your own work for credit? They're the only ones at risk of plagiarism accusations, not the legitimate original author.

Professors aren't rechecking your work again weeks, months, or years after you complete their courses. Plagiarism scanners don't just flag plagiarism without any other information; typically, they indicate exactly where and when the work was first scanned (and/or submitted), and in many cases, that also includes the academic institution where it was originally scanned (and/or submitted). Even if the scanner you used doesn't provide an automatic record, you can simply preserve your own record of the date that you scanned your work, whether through the dated email report they generated or by capturing the relevant dated screen shots, manually. The upshot is that plagiarism scanning only presents a risk of plagiarism accusations to whomever tries to use the work subsequent to the scans done by the original creator at the time of its first submission, regardless of whether the scanner is a traditional system or an AI program. IMO, this presents zero risk to the original creator of the work.

This is extremely unlikely, IMO. A normal person who is simply trying to earn a living by writing wouldn't suddenly resort to extorting and threatening a customer, just because he needed more money. Hundreds of millions of people need more money but never become criminals in their lines of work just because of their financial needs; the same goes for (real) writers who might fall on financial hard times.

Only a true sociopath would ever do anything like this, not someone who tried to earn an honest living as a writer, unsuccessfully. It's much more likely that this was a setup all along: he wrote a few simple essays specifically intending to use those essays as the basis for his blackmail/extortion scheme, which would only work if he knew that his customer submitted his essays for credit.

As I explained in this other thread, customers should never rely on anything in the TOS, without independent evidence that the company is legit, in the first place, because scam companies (and writers) can say anything in those TOS. Scam companies use their TOS as just another method of tricking customers into trusting them, when, in reality, they don't actually comply with the promises and "guarantees" in their own TOS. Website TOS mean absolutely nothing unless you already know that the company is legit. https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/company-report-plagiarism-2674/

More broadly, all anybody has to do is actually read the TOS of most essay companies -- even some legit companies -- to see that almost nothing in their TOS actually protects customers. Almost everything in their TOS is designed to protect the company against customer complaints, typically, by burying, in the fine print, all sorts of disclaimers, qualifications, and strict limitations of their obligations to customers. Two of the most common examples are: (1) Prohibiting customers from submitting the work for credit and from doing anything with the work besides "reading" and "studying" it and properly "citing" it as a reference in the customer's submitted work; and (2) Retaining exclusive copyright, forbidding the customer from owning the work that the customer paid for, and even going so far as to reserving the right of the company to contact the customer's school to "protect the company's copyright" if they suspect that the student submitted the work for credit.

In some cases, the customer-facing website guarantees the grade sought and paid for by the customer; meanwhile, their TOS prohibit submission of the work for credit while simultaneously requiring "proof" (in the form of a graded project) that the work failed to meet the grade "guaranteed." This is a classic "heads I win/tails you lose situation, because they won't issue any refund without "proof" that the work didn't meet the promised grade, but they'll deny any refund when the proof of the grade that they require also establishes that the customer violated the TOS by submitting it for credit. Likewise, if the customer rewrites the work substantially before submitting it, the company will deny any refund request, because the customer "changed" the work provided by the company.

When the OP asked about getting hired as a writer here, the field was extremely active and fully capable of generating an income equivalent to that of a traditional full-time job as a writer within a just few years, depending primarily on talent and the ability to earn the regular business of every new customer. Looking to become a professional academic writer for the first time now, almost 19 years later, in the age of AI, is much like someone hoping to become a professional typewriter repair specialist in 1996. Frankly, the only academic writers still making a living at it today are the best of the best who have already earned the trust of a substantial number of long-term clients. Everybody else, and even some writers who were actually very good, have already left the business.

Correct for all the reasons detailed in my Post # 32, and because publicizing the name of the company involved promotes the main purpose of this forum: namely, to help other students avoid being ripped off by the same company.

Legitimate essay companies and independent writers honor everything in their TOS, but (quite obviously), essay companies can say whatever they want in their TOS; so those TOS provide no benefit to customers unless the company is actually legitimate and trustworthy, in the first place. Just about every complaint on this forum about "money back guarantees," "satisfaction guarantess," and "unlimited revisions" (etc.) that were not honored involve scam companies that used their TOS as nothing but another tool to perpetuate their scams by duping gullible customers into trusting them. That's why promises and "guarantees" in the TOS of essay companies mean absolutely nothing without other independent evidence that the service provider you're considering has a long history of delivering high-quality projects and of actually honoring their TOS.

In 25 years, only one or two of my (thousands of) clients ever expressed any real interest in learning how to write their own projects. One of them used to pay me to provide supplemental explainers detailing how I researched, outlined, and structured many of his larger projects. The other ~999.9 % of my clients just wanted me to deliver submission-ready-quality projects on time without expressing any interest in the process.

One thing that makes it much easier is having access to an extensive history of a writer's several thousand substantive forum posts dating back almost 20 years for comparison. I know that there's no AI program in existence today that can write anywhere remotely close to the way that I write, or (especially) as well, even when it comes to informal forum posts, let alone formal academic writing. If you have nothing to compare to a writing sample, it might be very difficult to distinguish AI writing from really bad human writing, but it's extremely easy to identify human writing that's obviously much too good to have been written by any AI program. That's another tremendous advantage of finding a real legitimate writer on this forum where you can research every member's entire posting history to get a real sense of his or her unique writing style and substantive consistency of thought, attitude, and beliefs going back many years.

I've attended medical conferences to do journal projects for MaryAnnLiebert (liebertpub.com) and I've attended mandatory in-person training to write SAT practice tests for Princeton Review Books (princetonreview.com), because those were necessary and worth it to me for ongoing work from them, but I just didn't need the project enough to go meet someone for less than $200, which I figured he'd think was unreasonable. I don't chase after projects from reluctant or skeptical clients, and the deadline on this project is long enough that he could have just ordered a section of the project without meeting me and without risking as much money as he'd have been out just to meet me without receiving any work for that same money. If this ever happens again, maybe that's exactly what I'll suggest.


He said that he wanted me to see what the finished project was supposed to look like, not that he needed to meet me for his comfort. I simply explained that I've been doing this for 25 years without ever having to leave my apartment to meet a client and that there was nothing about this particular project that I'd need to see in person instead of reviewing photos or videos of whatever he wanted me to see, and I don't like changing my daily routines for anything that isn't absolutely necessary (to me). I have way too many other deadlines, a 4-5x/week workout schedule, a 2x/week (6:00 AM) summer hockey schedule for which I stay up all night (because I'd never be able to get to sleep by 8:00 or 9:00 PM to get up at 4:00 AM), constant board-of-director work to do for my building co-op, and I also like getting afternoon sun on my terrace whenever the rest of my schedule allows. The main reason I've chosen to do this kind of work instead of a traditional job, in the first place, is that I prefer to work from the comfort of my apartment.

I haven't changed my pricing at all, because I'm not actually competing with AI for business. Students who use AI for their essays have already made the decision that they'd rather just get C- essays for free than pay (any amount) for better results; and they're not comparing the prices of any human writers. They may have also figured that AI essays are comparable to really bad human writers who would also probably deliver C- work; so if they're satisfied with a C-, they might as well get their C- essays for free. So, it's really only writers who are unqualified to do this work well in the first place who might be competing with AI, because their product is comparable to the work generated by AI programs.

Conversely, students who want high-quality work that's likely to be an A are in the exact same position as they were before AI became a thing: they've never been interested in C- work from bargain-priced writing services, because they're willing to pay what highly experienced exceptionally good writers charge for projects of the highest quality. These are the same clients who may have tried out ChatGPT and immediately realized that current versions of AI aren't viable options for good essays and that if they want high marks, their only real option is the same as it's been for decades: to pay the best and most experienced independent writers in this industry the market rate for the best work available.

I try to make that information even easier for prospective clients to find, by including it prominently in big bold font, right on the Academic Essays section of my website.

It's true that you need to register your copyright before filing a federal infringement claim, and there definitely are several critical advantages of registering your copyright prior to infringement (such as in relation to what specific kinds of statutory protections become available and what kinds of damages can be pursued). However, you definitely don't need to register your copyright before delivering the work, because you can actually register it after the infringement occurs and then file the claim for infringement. Some of the statutory protections and damages available for infringement of registered work wouldn't be available for infringement of work registered only after infringement, and it definitely wouldn't have the same evidentiary value (such as in relation to proving when the work was originally produced). However, the date of original production can be established by other types of evidence, just not quite as easily.


Why not?

Exactly.

Just yesterday, for the first time in 25 years, a new prospective client (who also happens to live in NYC) insisted on meeting me in person to discuss his art project, to show me an example of a properly completed project. I provided my full name and location and told him that he could confirm that information through public sources, but I explained that this just isn't an efficient use of my time and that anything he wanted me to see could be emailed or uploaded for me to view.

Correct. Every website that you find by searching for reviews of essay companies is run by the essay companies with the highest supposed ratings on those "review" sites.

Agreed. It means nothing. The vast majority of reports on this forum from customers who have been ripped off by scam writers involved PayPal payments.

My clients know that they can reach me pretty much 24/7 unless I'm sleeping and that I usually respond to emails within hours or, as often as not, within minutes.

Nope. His last couples of sentences make it obvious that he was expressing his belief about the situation before the lockdown.

The (main) site that I used to work for only used its main company name to hire writers and it maintained only one assignment board from which we took orders; and they didn't use that company name as one of their (many) customer-facing websites. Their many essay sites funnelled all of their projects to that one project board; and it was the same 3 or 4 administrators who dealt with all of their writers. Unless we happened to receive project materials that included order information and the name of the website, we had no idea what essay site booked the project or what essay sites the company operated, because the only company name we saw was the parent company. Eventually I came to know of about a half a dozen of them, just from project materials or customer notes. Some of those sites charged customers higher prices than the others, but those orders weren't identified to writers as being any different from cheaper projects; they all just got posted on the same assignment board. It didn't affect what they paid us, because the payout of every project was posted on the assignment board and simply reflected whatever a writer's rate was.

This has always been my approach to discussion and argument.

Unless you and the client happen to live in the same jurisdiction, there's no realistic scenario that involves court systems. Likewise, very few projects are big enough to make it worthwhile to retain a lawyer, because a single hour of almost any lawyer's time probably costs more than the vast majority of writing projects; the same goes for the time and cost of making several round trips to court, even relatively nearby. Your best bet, therefore, is simply to follow my advice earlier in this thread about never doing any work unless or until it's already paid for in full, because chasing after clients over unpaid projects is almost never worthwhile.