The moment someone from a company ordered me to do something I was not willing to do would also be the last moment I would be inclined to work for that company. The entire point of freelancing is freedom to work when you want, how much you want, and with whom you want. Maybe that works for underpaid writers from who knows where, but I doubt any respectable writer would respond to that kind of treatment well. Being a freelancer is a lifestyle, mainly, and it revolves around not giving a **** about what other people want from you, unless its worth your time, effort, and it fits in your time table.

Yeah, there is. You can have completely free access to all of the journals in the world, with no limitations. You just have to look, and it doesn't even require a university/library card. I found it online and has done wonders for me, I offloaded nearly $150 per month in fees and memberships. Academic work should never be paid for, since the authors don't get paid to write it. I understand that money has to be made, but if they charge $30 per article read, then they should pay the writer at least 20% of every reading. Until they do, I opt to circumvent paid journals.

The fact that you're clearly associated with a company that competes on the same playing field, and then go around saying some of the most reliable and respected writers in the industry are cheats and scams is hypocritical. You don't see private writers saying all companies should be treated as scams just because some companies are. We know better. You have no basis for these claims, other than your own self-interest. All of the writers I know, respect, and work with only ever charge up front, in full, including myself. And none of the top writers in this industry ever thought about cheating a client. You need to retract that statement, as it borders on libel. There are, naturally, those who cheat and steal, but you cannot issue a blanket statement about all private writers when you know full well that there are honest, reliable, and respectable writers on this very forum.

There is a big difference between private writers and companies in the way they treat orders and clients. Companies, as far as I am familiar tend to charge a one-size-fits-all price and then distribute the work among writers, or have writers take projects from a central message board. I know of only two companies that distribute orders directly to their writers (and I like this version more, but that's my subjective opinion). Private writers charge differently based on difficulty/time, so prices tend to range much more. I can quote $24 pp for the simplest undergrad stuff, but if a client needs advanced work, or a dissertation then the prices can go upwards of $50-60. I imagine other writers do the same, or similar. Personally I use model 2 because I can't accept everything that comes my way.

I don't know what, if anything to add to this. There isn't a better job on the planet for couch surfers. Honestly, when this took off I was in heaven. I can get up whenever I want, do how much/little I want, and I don't have to worry about socializing with coworkers.. Perfect

I'm glad you like my work. As for my politeness, or lack thereof, I can come off that way when I'm overflown (which is often the case), so I do apologize, it's not something I do on purpose. But, after 100 emails with clients I try to cut every exchange short. Same goes for the deadline, I often have to shift papers because I get so busy I can't manage everything (working alone doesn't help, either). And during the season we all get urgent requests from long time clients, which means we have to email clients who booked earlier and ask for extensions (not pleasant but unavoidable at times).

No, it's not completely ethical - but I don't think there is a single job out there that is completely ethical - except brewers, brewers rock. But, then again, neither is pumping students' heads full of nonsensical ideas. Modern university does not teach, it sells. That is a sad state of affairs, but it's true whether we want to admit it or not. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of talent out there, and some of my clients are excellent students who just can't write. But most are just lost - and I mean completely lost - working two jobs just to pay for tuition, with no free time, no life, and no way forward without that piece of paper.

I have a fairly active presence, even though I don't advertise as much, it's just there so that students can find me easily. But you're mostly right, finding good services on FB is NOT a good way to go about it.

It boils down to convenience I guess. Although most of my clients who do find me on FB end up ordering only after they've looked me up on ES and other sites (mostly because I tell them to do that, not because they'd be inclined to do so). Convenience is the lord and master of online purchasing, and it's no different with essays.

It's easy to get on to, and you can start with virtually no investment. However, you do need to understand how the search algorithms work if you hope of reaching an audience that is actually interested in your services.

Ignore them. If you pay, they'll fu'k you up. If you don't pay, they'll fu'k you up.

There is nothing secret about it. You just have to look at the service section of some of the sites you (know the names of, sheesh), and see that exams and courses are part and parcel of their standard offer. The question of personal ethics rarely stops companies and individuals from accepting any type of orders, even though it should. Exam taking for clients is just wrong, plain and simple. If you willingly accept money to help solve exams for students, you are no better than scammers in my book. I was offered money for this countless times, and I always refuse. I did it once, when I first started, just because I didn't have a clue about anything. After that, I said nope, not doing it regardless of the money - and people are willing to pay a LOT of money for this, especially a certain demographic group.

If I did think that you called me stupid, we'd be having a wholly different discussion. But, as the rules of the forum state, take everything at face value, believe nothing, and question everything.

To your point - there is a very objective measure of utility (as I mentioned above), and in the case of obsolete forum posts it is very simple - does it have value in the current moment (the criteria is open for debate, but all it really takes is a grain of salt in your head and some basic observation skill to see what is relevant - it's not that hard). I never stated that I alone know what is useful in every instance, but I do know what is useful to students in general. And most other members do as well. If something works, no problem have at it.

But you can't tell me that your view of utility is so different that you fail to gauge the (sometimes) severe lack of meaning in many of the posts that appear in these long forgotten threads. I linked an example above, that revives a thread about a DEAD company. And there are many similar examples - that tackle issues that are of 0 relevance whatsoever, regardless of your measurement standards.

There are also examples of useful threads revived (albeit rarely), and that was never in question; something FW pointed out and I should probably have accentuated in my original post.

What is in question is the objective value (not subjective, mind you - mine or yours, or anyone else's) that the viewers receive from such revivals, and does that measure of value justify them being revived. I say it does not unless they meet a tangible criteria. We can have a different discussion about the criteria if you'd like, but the point stands. That's all.

P.S - whoever reads this thread will know instantly of whom I speak, no need to call them out. You're new, but you just have to browse a bit (say last year), to see the pattern quite clearly.

Oh dear God. So, let's get this straight. I can't assess the usefulness of a thread because I'm "stupid", but you in your infinite wisdom can - now isn't that convenient, and completely illogical? Why doesn't that surprise me.

The fact that some people are reopening decades' old threads for their own benefit is something I take exception to because its meaningless, it obscures the fact that those who are doing such things have very little of value to offer (they appear in search more frequently, therefore they must have something of value to offer), and are generally pretty clueless about this industry.

As someone who has been here for a while, I tend to give myself the benefit of a doubt about what is and what is not relevant to students, simply because I've experienced almost every single form of abuse/praise/scam/success that is discussed on this forum, as have other reputable writers at one point in their career. This allows me some authority, which I don't purport to have, but is there nonetheless.

Here is an example of a thread that has no utility whatsoever, and it was revived after 6 years
https://essayscam.org/forum/es/kenyawriting-good-bad-3544/

I have a paid email account, in fact several of them. I only use those for marketing and business purposes. The fact is, if you take the time to look up the emails of some of the writers posting here, you can find a slew of content they wrote, or linked, or whatever else. After being in the industry for so long, there's bound to be a lot of traces online. What you should worry about is writers who try to sell themselves as having 10, 15, or 20 years of experience, while their respective emails return exactly 0 results when you look them up online.

I am currently working on a paper that is meant for publication in a respected academic journal by a PhD candidate. Interesting, albeit unconventional project.

That was precisely my point. Relevant threads (such as scam advice or info on a current company, or whatever else) is both relevant and necessary, so updates are quite fine. However, trying to revive old threads just for the purpose of getting your post count up is (in my view at least) just plain stupid. There's no better way to put it. I mean, there was a thread where a client asked for advice about a specific order from a site, and hadn't posted anything since 2006. The thread was revived with completely useless information - who benefits from this, I wonder?


Sorry, but reviving a thread about a specific order almost 10 years after the fact is obtuse.


Maybe, but relevant posts were not the topic of my post, irrelevant ones were as you yourself made clear in your quotes


How can a discussion about a company that is no longer in operation be relevant to anyone?


No, there are ways to assess relevancy objectively - if someone was inclined to try. I was stating that clearly irrelevant, meaningless, and utterly obtuse comments on decades' old threads were not good practice. You disagree?

Sorry but a thread that has been dead for nearly a decade, and was started by a student who wanted information about a specific topic needs no continuation. For example, a student asks about a specific element of essay writing, or advice on a company that no longer exists. The responses he/she got over the first month, or two months, inform the student about everything they wanted to know. The thread has served its purpose, and is no longer necessary (except as an archive to inform other students who come looking for the same company). Reviving a thread like this has only one purpose - to pump your stats. I've been on this forum for nearly 6 years, and contributed roughly 300-320 meaningful posts about relevant topics. In the same time frame, I've seen some posters pump up 600-700 posts that were either completely irrelevant or completely wrong, just for the sake of having their name show up on threads. I understand the need to promote yourself, that's fine, but pumping up your post count by reviving 10 year-old dead threads is not the way to go. Especially not, and this happens often, if that question lost its relevance in the time it passed since it was asked.

20% of quotes in any paper that is not for a lit class is absurd. If possible, I avoid using quotes altogether, especially in fields such as marketing, economy, history.....The only time a quote is viable if it directly references a situation that the essay is based upon, and even then, their use should be limited to as few words as possible. When I was in university, I would fill my papers with so much quotes that it was impossible to read through. There was barely any me in the work. Once I started writing papers for a living, though, I realized that was completely wrong. Thanks Michelle :)

I have a VERY limited list of writers to whom I divert clients, and both PV and FW are on that list, along with several others. The only criteria is that the writers produce at least as good a paper as myself, or if possible better. After years in this business, you get to a point where you appreciate individuals who can produce quality content, are dependable, honest, and most of all willing to help out in case of an emergency. I am really glad PV was able to help, he is one of the good ones in this industry. Will be sad to see him leave, even if we compete (fairly) for the same chunk of the market.

Any writer, company or private, who takes assignments he/she is not qualified to do is a moron and will have a very, very short career in this field. It's a self correcting problem Major. Such attempts may work for a month, or two, but eventually they will get called on their bullsh*t and simply vanish.


Except for the fact that a company has 100 or more writers to roll on, a private writer can provide the same value - and even the fact that we work alone gets mitigated by the fact that those of us who take this work seriously enough always have a contingency to fall back on in case of emergency. What other "value" does a company offer that private writers do not? Maybe I'm biased, but I don't see it, customers who choose private writers do so precisely because we are individual writers, as they get tired of constantly being switched around through the company system.


This sentence is either purposefully or by chance constructed in such a way that it appears companies consider their own writers to be scammers. If that's the case, that's a sorry state of affairs. As for the secrecy, I understand why such a system exists, people get tempted to do all sorts of things.

Editing is far, far more complicated and in the end more costly than writing from scratch. Rewriting is rarely as straightforward as simple rewording of the text. It is not a simple task to re-write someone else's ideas in the same voice and still maintain the integrity of the argument. In most cases the work is so bad that there are no cogent arguments whatsoever, and then you have to explain to the student why the price is so high. I just tell my clients outright that it would be simpler, faster, and cheaper to write it anew. When they persist, I make sure it's worth my time to do the edit/rewrite.

From what I can tell, there is no real recourse for scammers operating from foreign countries, regardless of the source. That is to say, this problem is not limited to the US alone, it's present in every state. This industry just happens to be the most developed in English speaking countries, primarily the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, Canada, and Australia, so the proclivity for scams seems to be the highest. Moreover, it's not likely that a scammer operating from Africa or Asia will know Swedish, French, or Spanish to the same degree as they do English, which creates an objective obstacle to the same types of scams being committed by foreigners in those respective markets.

I actually write for a company that regularly publishes samples of their writers work for clients to see. While I don't agree with some of their policies (such as selling completed homework cases - to which I was opposed and asked specifically to not include me in the scheme, which they agreed but left several of my works in the library), the students are all the better for it, since they can read some of my work before placing an order and still know that it's actually my work, and not something I copied online (which most samples provided to unsuspecting clients by scam sites are).

The fact of the matter is many students have a bad habit of trusting the first site they come across, which usually means whatever site is currently ranked no.1 on Google or Bing. That's a problem since the majority of those sites belong to large networks of Ukranian/Pakistani/other origin that prey on just that type of students. Now some of them actually produce content, but in more cases than not, ES and other sites like it are only the second destination for such students. Once they've been burnt, they come here looking for help, and by then they already lost money, but more importantly their trust in essay services. I have had so many clients who came to me only after they got burnt and became loyal clients of mine, but only after they spent a lot of my time seeking assurances I could not give (most frequent of which is guaranteeing a grade; something I outright refuse to do).

Degrees are relevant, make no mistake about it, but they're also not the only indicator of success. On average, most quality writers will have advanced degrees, but some great writers may not have any degrees whatsoever. That said, the likelihood of finding a great writer without a degree is much smaller than finding an equally great writer with an MA, or higher. The majority, I think, are in the middle, holding at least a BA or equivalent (depending on their place of residence). Writing skill is not linked to college education at all, but the ability to do research and think critically is, at least in some part.

This happens to me all the time. I usually go out somewhere around 1am to get smokes and a Red Bull (if it's a really bad day), and when my neighbors see me they always give me that "look" - like you're not sure whether someone is crazy, dealing drugs, or going out to shoot somebody for money. Since I don't really talk about my work with anyone outside of my closest circle, I imagine there is a bunch of crazy theories about my work activities. The last I heard some of my neighbors think that I deal drugs. Other's probably think I'm a bum since I rarely go out in the middle of the night looking sharp.

The main problem with ratings posted online is that they're very difficult to verify. I was attacked on this very site by a person claiming reviews on my site were falsified (even if there was no way that person could know if that was true or not), which they're not by the way. However, this does indicate that there is a problem with reviews, as there are many companies out there that just hire people to write hundreds of reviews for them without ever writing a single paper. This is a problem for those (like me), who have a smaller number of reviews that just happen to be completely true, because the general perception is skewed to the negative.

This is the part that most student don't realize. Most writers (whether private or company writers) only ever start working on the order on the due date or the day before - depending on their schedule. After writing something like 12-20 thousand hours worth of papers in all imaginable subjects, you tend to develop a certain skill set that allows you to gloss over pretty much any piece of literature and draw out the most important bits and pieces. Most students need weeks of reading to do the same amount of research professionals can do in one afternoon.

That's 100% correct, and I don't consider them competitors or service providers in any real sense. Students who have the misfortune to order from them regret it the second they receive their "paper" and never return again. But they do provide something, even if its a shoddy paper, and that puts them one step above the outright scams who do not. The value to customers is nil in both cases, but in the former they are not a target of extortion, even though they lose regardless.

In this context, quasi legitimate referred to their apparent willingness to actually provide content, unlike outright scams where the student is bereft of money and likely to become a target for extortion. It was not implied, in any way, that such services provide a good service, or even compete legitimately - if that were the case, I'd have omitted the "quasi" as a descriptor. Mayhaps it is not differentiated enough from legitimate services, so I'll try to find a better qualifier when referring to them in the future.

P.S - great cartoon

This is not entirely accurate. If you look carefully, most of the Ukrainian sites are turning to a new model - where the prices are set by writers themselves, and the company acts as a mediator. This is largely fueled by the reasons you noted above, and partially by the fact that the customers are becoming ever more careful about their money. Now, most students still pay before they think/look/ask, but a large number of them does their due diligence before paying a dime. This is good for us, the legit writers, and companies - as I've always asserted, both groups should strive to increase our combined visibility to help students make informed choices - but the process is very, very, very slow.

What I do know is that there is a growing number of quasi legit operations from Pakistan, India, and elsewhere which charge as much as legit writers/companies, but deliver close to nothing in terms of quality. The Chinese are also growing, but they are largely localized to SE Asia, and not a threat in the West, at least not yet. These new quasi-companies are, however mostly one-and-done operations that move constantly and create new sites almost daily.

What is the solution? I have no idea to be completely honest, but I'd say just do the best we can and win our clients trust over and over again. In the long run, that's the only sustainable way to do business.

The fact that we have to do the same assignments over and over is one of the very few negative aspects of this work, in addition to night work (for me anyway), and hectic living arrangements without a clear schedule (due to constantly being swamped by emails and having to write whenever there is work to be done).

Writing 50, 60, or more papers on Shakespeare can get old rather fast, so it's only natural to cut some corners. However, if what you say is true, these writers were let go completely legitimately. I have to add that cutting corners - such as writing about a specific passage from memory because you did the exact same paper two days ago - is not the same as simply copying the passage from another paper. If done properly, it can save time, but there must be a measure to everything, as we are paid to provide original, well researched, and coherent arguments in all the papers we write.

I find that literature I read stays with me, especially in those fields I find the most interesting, so it's not a problem remembering what a specific author wrote about it, even several months later. However, I do not see any merit in trying to copy-paste your work, since it always comes back to bite you in the as*, eventually.

That type of treatment mostly depends on the type of person that is on the other end of the conversation with CS. If you're too agreeable, then there's nothing stopping the other guy from imposing an ever more rigorous set of rules for you to follow, knowing full well that you will never complain. If, however, you have a harder stance, the demeanor is likely to be much different. I find that it also depends on the manner in which you came to the company - if they recruited you specifically, or asked you to join (which has happened to me several times), then they are far less likely to even try to engage in this type of behavior. If you applied through regular channels, and did not show some backbone from the get go, you're likely going to experience issues with CS or HR (depends on the company).

Exactly. I learned this after two clients kept coming back for revisions that, at the time, seemed completely redundant to me. After some digging I realized that's the norm in the UK/AU, so I adjusted my prices to reflect the extra work required.

P.S - this new look is horrible.

Well, we saved our cat from the dumpster - so there's that. Someone put him in a bag, closed it with duct tape and threw him in. He was there for at least two days (thrash is collected every three days), completely frozen, hungry, and deprived of oxygen.

He comes to chill out on his own and then you can do whatever you want, but if you try to pet him while he's not "in the mood", he gets defensive. Also likes to run around the block with other cats, very rarely at home. Still love him though, just not as much as my dogs.

If you try to pet my cat anywhere other than his head, you're going to get stitches. Not a nice dude, in the slightest :D

@FreelanceWriter
Yeah, cats are the equivalent of teenagers at the height of their hormonal imbalance - feed me, clothe me, and f*uck off