The main purpose of this forum, I believe, is to expose scams in the online academic writing world. I hope, however, that this doesn't preclude the discussion of other vulnerabilities in the industry besides outright scams.

It might be helpful to look at these hazards from the perspective of how students expose themselves to disappointments (in general). This is not to pass the blame on to the students, but to underscore their role in their own letdown:

1. Picking a wrong service provider. This is by far the main cause of disappointments for thousands of students. This is a never-ending subject. Forum members have debated it here for years. Let me state that any student who knows of EssayScam should be out of this danger.

2. Giving incorrect paper details and requirements when ordering. This includes picking the wrong referencing style/format, misrepresenting the academic level (perhaps to lower the price), specifying the wrong paper type etc.

3. Leaving out crucial information. I once had a student wait until just before I sent her the paper to mention that it was mandatory to use 2 specific books.

4. Procrastinating until the last minute to place an order. This one causes disappointments if enhanced by the first point. Competent and experienced writers can produce 25 pages of top-quality work even within a 24hr period. But waiting until the last minute then selecting a writer with limited experience working under pressure is bound to lead to letdowns.

5. Unrealistic expectations. This leads to disappointments in most situations in life anyway. In this business, you should consider yourself lucky (or at least ahead) if you even get what you pay for. Many don't.

6. Believing every marketing message out there. Students should realize that academic writing, although unique in its own way, is still a business much like most others. It is unwise to take some of the claims literally or as absolute truths. The car in front is NOT ALWAYS a Toyota. Red Bull DOES NOT give you wings. Uber might not have the safest rides on the road (and was actually sued for claiming so). These 3 examples demonstrate exaggerations that toe the line on what is allowed in advertising. Virtually all marketing messages are meant to convert prospects into paying customers. They should therefore not be taken at face value, especially in an industry such as this. Some of the claims by essay writing websites go beyond permitted puffery. The scammers inject intentionally misleading information. Some of this material is even passed on as statistical data and third-party content. I have expounded more on this point in another thread.

Nearly all of the infractions that writers get punished for by essay companies are enough to warrant outright termination of employment.

The decision to keep writers on the employment roster after particular offences speaks to poor judgment and lack of professionalism in the part of the companies.

A writer who plagiarizes (especially above a certain percentage) is not one to be trusted with future projects. It shouldn't matter how many flawless projects this writer has completed in the past. The issue that caused this one instance of plagiarism is bound to arise again in the future. It is shocking to learn the methods many sites use to deal with this matter though. There's one 'big' essay writing company (running several sites) that officially provides writers with a 'plagiarism report' for each submitted document, then offers suggestions on how to improve the document before resubmission. The system is actually officially designed to anticipate and accommodate plagiarism. That is an unfortunate state of affairs.

The same applies to the case where a writer submits a paper whose content is somehow irrelevant or unfitting. Failure to sufficiently understand and accurately interpret instructions/requirements is a rookie mistake which no paying customer should be exposed to, especially considering that actual academic credentials could be impacted. I understand that professional academic writing does not come naturally to all, and some may require training and time to learn. But this should not be at the potential expense of a paying customer.

What might be hard to sell is the notion that even a writer who submits work late should be fired. As a seasoned professional writer, I know there are some instances where unforeseen circumstances might cause delays. However, the impact of most of these instances can be neutralized by professional risk management on the part of the writer who is getting paid. This risk management should be part of the writer's job.

Aspiring independent writers can hone their skills and learn the trade while simultaneously taking on projects. A company, however, should only offer clients services of thoroughly vetted and fully qualified experts. Like I had earlier mentioned, any company that habitually tries to rehabilitate offending writers and continuously accommodates transgressions is not acting in the best interests of its clients. To the contrary, it is exposing them to considerable risks.

One of the pointers constantly used by students (as well as other players in the industry) to sieve the legit sites from the fraudsters and incompetents is pricing. The general opinion is that legit sites charge more for the same number of words/pages.

There is some validity in this notion. For a long time, it was a bit easy to tell (to some degree) which sites were hiring competent ENL writers. Since competition has always been stiff, new, experimenting sites needed to lower their prices to lure customers and test the market. They also lacked nearly all of the other reasonable legitimacy checkbox items, so they really needed to work that discounting angle. Several factors allowed them to do this and still remain operational. The dozens of sites that exploded into the industry between 2002-2012 were/are based in Ukraine, Philippines, Pakistan etc. The regulatory laws in those countries are a bit lax (major euphemism) compared to those in more developed countries.

This was even worse for a then (in those countries) unrecognizable field like online academic writing. New sites cropping up could operate flagrantly with zero adherence to any of the rules and standards that are the basic norm in the US/UK. Add on to this that they don't pay taxes, and what you have is a renegade setup that could undercut bona fide companies by up to 50% and still be profitable. Writers in the countries where they recruit from come unbelievably cheap. There are reported cases of writers being paid under a dollar per page, believe it or not.

Now, the legitimate US/UK companies have never enjoyed some of these luxuries, for reasons we don't need to get deep into here. Let us just focus on the most relevant one today, which is that competent ENL writers don't come cheap. Two main factors play to this. First, competence comes with the achievement of higher academic qualifications. Anybody with a Master's or PhD has career options and can easily secure a job in their field of study. It is therefore unlikely that they would work for meager wages completing academic papers in an industry lacking (among other things) conventional securities. Second, an ENL writer (at least somewhat) is most likely living in a developed country with a stable economy and enjoying certain employment guarantees. They don't have to settle an essay writing company offering low pay. A competent ENL writer can only work for a company paying rates high enough to persuade them into academic writing as a way of earning a living.

These dynamics have had the effect of maintaining the prices of legit companies above the others, making it easier to tell the two classes apart.

Over time, however, this has changed. The ESL sites have managed to leverage the slight traction they got through low prices into a somewhat steady client flow. They have also devised numerous marketing tactics (not all legit) that blind potential clients to cost. Now they can raise their prices to match the legitimate sites without losing as much business and while still maintaining the same lower expense bill. This renders the price telltale no longer reliable.

Many campaigns (in this forum and other online platforms) advocate for the rights of student customers. It is not very often that folks here highlight the ordeals of writers in the hands of essay companies.

I have been a writer for more than a decade. During this time, I have witnessed all manner of practices from several essay companies run without clear-set regulations or standards of operation. Some of these practices are incredibly unfair while others are outright criminal.

I need to point out that it is only the unscrupulous sites that engage in these practices. Legitimate and established companies act right by their writers:

1. Force-assigning orders. During registration, most companies state that one of the benefits of working for them is that writers get to pick/take/bid only on orders they are happy and comfortable working on. This honeymoon phase doesn't last too long though. At some point, their Support Team needs people to work on those off-putting orders that no writer wants to touch (for whatever reason), but whose deadlines are fast approaching. This is why they "force-assign" to writers they think may complete the orders. Now, a writer is "free" to "reject" such assignments, but usually (and unofficially) at their own future expense. First, habitually rejecting force-assigned orders limits the number of future bids being accepted. Then there's a threshold for the number of rejections possible before triggering a "warning letter" for being uncooperative and unsupportive.

2. Manufacturing Lateness. There are several ways they do this. The common one is putting a paper back on "revision" with an unbelievably short deadline at a time when the writer is most likely unable to execute. A cruder way is by manually shortening an assigned paper's deadline and hoping that a writer won't notice (yes, it's been known to happen). They do this either to directly fine the writer for the late order/revision, to accumulate lateness counts to trigger an overall fine applied to all orders, or to prevent the writer from achieving bonus-tagged efficiency milestones.

3. Altering instructions midway without compensating the writer. The way most companies operate is that they charge the client a fee for changing order details (or changing the deadline) after work on it has started. This is normally to compensate for the work already done or the effort and inconvenience of changing course. Not all companies trickle this additional payment down to the writers.

4. Withholding funds unrelated to alleged infraction. Some sites dismiss writers (for plagiarism, lateness, or whatever) then deny them (the writers) access to the funds they've accumulated up to that point from previously completed papers. This is different from fining the writer to compensate the client. Even sites that have no stated compensatory obligations to the client (in the event of plagiarism or lateness) do this. This is just one example.

5. Robbing writers outright. There's a disreputable Eastern European group that has writers walking on eggshells the entire duration of their engagement with them. As soon as a writer's account accumulates funds above a certain amount, they become targets for random unfounded accusations. These charges are the pretext for immediate termination of employment, permanent deactivation of a writer's account (leaving no records for reference), and withholding of all funds due to the writer. There is zero room for putting on a defense or responding to the charges. All a writer gets is an email saying "We are sorry..."

These are just but a few of the infamous practices.

Anyone writing for a company guilty of any of these should consider quitting and working for a more civilized organization.

There aren't many "legally recognized" industries plagued by deception and underhanded practices as much as this. The tales of people getting ripped off have spread so far and wide that the mention of "essay writing service" immediately conjures up an alert in almost everyone who hears it. Scam artists have largely contributed to the dubious perception people have of the essay writing business.

It is not only the paying clients who get victimized. The lies and con games of the majority are effectively stinking up the entire industry and adversely upsetting the operations of the genuine few.

I know this topic is extremely broad, and perhaps every fitting thread on this forum somehow addresses it.

It is imperative, however, that every opportunity to cleanse the market be taken and exhausted.

These are some of the most common lies peddled by scamming websites. This list does not come close to being exhaustive, and barely scratches the surface of the matter it aspires to address. It only mentions a few express lies and misrepresentations. It leaves out the devious tactics and illegal machinations not visible to the targeted customers. Many forum members have already contributed to those and will continue to. Some topics will never run out of new content.

The lies mentioned here are also not the darkest known to industry veterans, but rather those that students come across and need to watch out for:

1. All our writers are ENL writers. Very few essay companies employ only ENL writers. Very few. Most of the others say this because they know the effect it has on potential customers. Some sites say this without even fully understanding what it means.

2. Reviews and testimonials. Most (nearly all) reviews and testimonials from supposed customers are fake. Genuine students who use essay writing services wouldn't care enough to go through the hustle of finding a different forum/blog/site to post how "satisfied" they are with a product. They know they don't need to. All they have to do is use the same service next time, or at most tell a friend. A student has zero incentive singing praises of an essay company online. Many of them want to keep it a secret that they paid to get a paper completed.

3. Years of experience. Most websites are not truthful about how long they've been operational. Those of us who've been in this business long enough know that there are only a handful of essay writing companies that are more than 15 years old, with 3 or 4 having already hit the 20-year mark. Nearly all the rest are imitators, chancers, experimenters, fraudsters, and/or latecomers.

4. 100% Money back guarantee. There's no such thing, at least not in the sense it is normally intended to imply. I have covered this more exhaustively in a different thread.

5. FREE stuff. This is not a lie as much as it is a lame gimmick. Dozens of sites keep mentioning that they offer free bibliography page, free title page, free formatting, free online support etc. That's almost like Apple advertising that a new iPhone comes with a free screen.

6. Stats and Metrics. I'm yet to come across a site saying they deliver less than 90% of their orders on time, or that their average quality score is under 7/10. If you can't verify them, don't believe them.

7. Samples. This is especially true for sites that allow students to pick writers before placing orders. The writer samples are mostly not prepared by the writers attached to them. From a different perspective, consider the implications of a company giving out full rights to a paper it has prepared for a client only to later provide the same paper in future as a sample to a different student.

8. FREE plagiarism checker. I debated including this one then I figured it's better to err on the side of caution. This is a polarizing issue that has been discussed enough in several threads already. My opinion is that it belongs in this list. Hopefully, having it here will trigger some little restraint or initiate a thorough search for a more definite conclusion by a needy student.

Many students fall for the marketing gimmick mentioning that an essay company offers "100% Money-back Guarantee". There are nearly half a dozen ways in which this is (almost always intentionally) misleading.

The obvious implication to a casual student would be that the company offers a full refund should the client be disappointed with what they receive. There are numerous dubious essay companies that are misguided and desperate enough to offer this kind of guarantee, and they often land a few clueless victims. Such sites hope the clients will either be too lazy to pursue the refund or will somehow not mind the mediocre papers they receive. Worst case scenario, they figure, is that they get one refund request out of a hundred sales.

Not all these sites are that stupid though. Many scamming sites hope that this first impression created by the mention of the guarantee lasts with potential customers up until the point they part with their hard-earned cash in hopes of receiving a quality paper. This is because hidden somewhere in the fine print are disclaimers that are as varied and unintelligible as those who draft them.

Some sites state that the offer expires once the client's order is "assigned to a writer". Their insurance against this is that the papers are normally almost automatically "assigned" once the client completes payment, thus guaranteeing no refund claims.

The truth is that this kind of refund (full refund after service delivery) almost NEVER occurs. Actually, considering the nature of this industry, a customer should (for several reasons) question any service provider who promises to refund money on account of their (client) dissatisfaction with the final product.

There are those outfits that are a bit evolved. They calculate refund amounts according to how much work has already gone into the paper at the point of a refund claim. This sounds like a fair policy. As a writer, I have faced moments when a client cancels an order after I'm done with all the background research (which is sometimes the bulk of the work). The problem with this policy for most companies, however, is that discretion for determining the amount of "work already done" lies solely with said companies. Time-to-deadline is not what is used to calculate refund owed. A client has little claim over the amount of refund offered. They have to sit and eat it, even if it is 10% refund being offered 5hrs after payment on an order with a week's deadline.

Then there are the real bottom-of-the-barrel leeches who have absolutely nothing to lose. These are the shameless entities who take clients' money, don't deliver anything at all, refuse to offer any refund (since all this was their intention all along), threaten clients with exposure to their academic institutions should they raise a stink (either by filing charge-backs or whistle-blowing elsewhere), extort the clients further in a few cases, then move on to the next victims in love with claims of guarantees.

This money-back guarantee shouldn't offer ANY comfort to a student, nor should it be used as a criterion for picking a service vendor to use.

Thorough vetting remains the surest and safest way to pick a reliable, competent, and honest service provider.