This whole topic has been beaten to death. Native-English speakers don't want non-native speakers to write their projects because their vocabulary, word choice, sentence structure, and (especially) their (usually incorrect) use of idiomatic expressions are all different from ours and any experienced reader (especially professors) can spot those differences immediately. That's also why ESL writers often lie: because they know that NES students don't want anything written by ESL writers. It's really not any more complicated than that, nor does it have anything to do with the relative quality of their respective academic training, because projects written by even the brightest and best-trained ESL writers are still obviously recognizable as ESL to NES readers, including well-researched projects that are of decent substantive academic quality, which is also quite rare, at least from what I've seen of ESL academic writing.

Welcome.

I'm sorry, but you (still) don't seem to understand even the most basic things about what contracts are, or the fact that the distinction between "independent contractors" and fulltime "employees" has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there might still be an enforceable contractual relationship between essay companies and the independent freelance contractors who write for them. Do you read responses to your posts? Because I've explained all of this before, but you still post the same exact incorrect statements over and over as though you've never even bothered to read direct responses to your posts.

First, most essay companies do require their writers to sign formal contracts that clearly spell out the respective obligations of both parties. Typically, those contracts strictly prohibit writers from privately soliciting any clients of the company, and those prohibitions are valid and fully enforceable; they're also completely standard in almost any industry where employers use independent contractors. Second, the policies of any company are whatever that company says they are, and as long as those policies aren't inherently illegal, their writers either have to accept those policies or find work elsewhere. Even without any formal contract -- and as I've explained, most companies do require their writers to sign formal contracts -- a contractual relationship still exists between the parties, and it's defined by whatever the two parties agreed to in their communications, such as in emails simply detailing that the writer will provide non-plagiarized work and that the company will pay $__ per written page. Those are enforceable obligations on both sides, irrespective of whether or not anything referred to as a "contract" was ever executed. It's always more difficult to prove what a company would have to prove to win a case without a written contract, obviously, but that's a matter of what evidence there is, not whether or not a contractual obligation exists. The same goes for the difference between written contracts and oral contracts: oral contracts are equally valid; it's just much harder to prove anything based on an oral agreement.

You seem to think that: (1) companies cannot have contracts with independent contractors because only fulltime employees can be required to sign contracts; (2) that the respective obligations of the parties can't exist and/or are not enforceable unless they've signed something formally referred to as a "contract," and that (3) companies cannot prohibit their independent contractors from poaching their clients unless there's a formal written contract saying that. You're 100% wrong on all counts.

This is true. If you're interested in a more detailed explanation, just check this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/es/wedoyouressay-legit-5081/#msg83706

Back when I wrote for essay companies, there were several scenarios that could easily result in a delayed response. The main reason is simply that essay companies are 100% dependent on their writers to respond to customer messages. If a writer has an emergency, the company isn't going to get a response from the writer any sooner than the customer contacting a writer directly. A writer could forget entirely about a project and go away for a weekend (or whatever) and not bother to check emails, especially if he doesn't realize that he missed a deadline. Companies may have no mechanism to monitor projects whose deadlines are about to expire on their assignment boards, with no writer ever taking them. That definitely happens at legit companies, and they'll always issue refunds in those cases; but that won't be much help to customers who never receive their projects or any notification that their projects haven't been taken by a writer in time to make their deadlines. I think about the best they can do is make sure customers understand that no project order is ever "confirmed" until a notice is received that a writer has taken the project, and/or install some automatic warning to let CS reps know anytime there are projects posted on the board with deadlines about to expire, so that they can jump in and start contacting their best writers with bonus offers to take those projects. I used to get a lot of those; but I usually didn't take them, because anytime they have to start offering more money for posted projects, that usually means there was something about the project that caused it to be ignored by all of their writers.

You guys are just so bad at pretending to be customers that you'd be better off just being honest and registering as company reps and making your best case to refute the comments with which you disagree. Once in a while, real customers do respond to defend writers and companies they've actually used; but real students' comments don't go on to sound like promotional marketing. If you guys knew the difference and if your English were up to the task, you'd be much more convincing. Nevertheless, let's give you an extremely generous benefit of doubt and imagine that you're actually a genuine customer. I'm (really) not saying this for the purpose of insulting you, but your English is fairly low-level ESL. That means you can't really know anything about how well anything is written in English.

Really?

This was a huge mistake, too. Never give any essay company direct access to your school system like that.

The amount of time that a website has been online doesn't (by itself) guarantee the quality of the work it provides; it merely provides some evidence that the company isn't an outright scam, because it's hard for scam companies to continue operating very long without changing identities. Even legit companies have many writers who are much worse than their better writers; so, the work they deliver to customers can vary quite substantially. I saw this firsthand when I was writing for one of the oldest legitimate online companies whenever I took projects that had to be re-ordered because the customer (quite rightfully, in my opinion) wasn't satisfied with the quality of the work but the company refused to redo them for free because, technically, they satisfied the original (objective) order specs. About the most that a company's long history of existence online actually guarantees is that you'll probably receive something rather than nothing at all for your money, that your money will be refunded if no writer ever takes your order (although usually long after your project's due date), and that the work you do receive will probably represent some writer's good-faith attempt at doing the project correctly. What it doesn't guarantee is that the quality of the work will satisfy your reasonable expectations.

Just ignore them and don't respond to any further communications from them. Don't even open their emails; just delete them or, better yet, add them to your list of blocked email senders.

There's simply no way to know what the appropriate price is for any project based on the word-count, alone. One would need to know the level of school, the area of study, the exact topic, the exact specifications, and the deadline; and one would need to review any materials provided by the client.

Obviously, there are both good and bad ENL writers, because native-language fluency (alone) is no guarantee that anybody is necessarily a good writer. Nobody (at least nobody sane) has ever argued that all ENL writers are better than all ESL writers. The OP (and other disclosed and undisclosed reps of ESL companies and some ESL writers) often used to try to set up that silly straw man argument here. Obviously, a lazy and/or incompetent writer is no good, regardless of the ENL/ESL issue; furthermore, there are also lazy incompetent ESL writers just as there are unqualified ENL writers. The point about ESL writers is simply that everything else being equal, American and British customers prefer ENL writers for very good reasons: because very few ESL writers can write in English that isn't immediately recognizable as ESL English, especially by American and British professors.

Some ESL writers are much better than others, and they're usually the ones who don't try to misrepresent themselves and lie to customers about being ESL writers. If all ESL writers were honest about it, there'd be very little interest in the whole topic, because customers could decide for themselves whether or not to hire an ESL writer. The only reason the distinction ever became such a heated issue here in the first place is that so many ESL writers and company reps misrepresent themselves; and they do that, precisely, because they know that American and British customers tend to prefer writers whose native language is English, and for no other reason than the fact that our writing doesn't include all of the extremely obvious red flags that a project wasn't written by someone whose native language is English.

It's not exactly a huge revelation, nor does that report necessarily have to have been commissioned by a "competitor." The simple truth is that the vast majority of the "writers" working for most essay companies just aren't very good at all. Forget about the companies that are outright scams because they provide either nothing at all or nothing more than some garbage copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia and other online sources. If you order a standard academic project from most essay companies, the product you'll receive usually won't be very helpful and/or any better than what any college freshman could have produced himself without paying anybody. Even when I was writing for completely legitimate essay companies, I was almost always shocked at how bad the essays were anytime I happened to see anything written by any of their other writers, with the exception of their only 3 or 4 other good writers.

I came to know them only because, in 2007 or 2008, the company asked all of us to come here to respond (100% truthfully) to some of the ridiculous and outrageously false accusations posted by one disgruntled ex-writer and (I think) one dissatisfied customer. Those writers were ProfessorVerb, ResearchPro, and Pheelyks. Professor Verb retired a couple of years ago after a long successful career; ResearchPro died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2015; and Pheelyks took a good job in a totally different field. Back then, the four of us were their top writers, both in terms of our regular output volume and (especially) in the quality of our work. Some of the work I happened to see that their other writers produced (such as when I received those essays in conjunction with a new order for the exact same project requesting a different writer) was just atrocious; and this was at a legitimate American company with an A+ Better Business Bureau rating that never ripped anybody off or tolerated plagiarism.

No legit writers have ever done this on this forum. Those practices were always the exclusive domain of several disgruntled and/or ridiculously unqualified writers and/or various undisclosed company reps and principals disparaging legitimate writers as part of their strategy to damage their reputations instead of competing against us fairly and honorably the way we legit writers have always coexisted here peacefully despite being competitors for the same prospective new clients.

Both the company rep in Post #430 and the writer(s) who wrote their website are definitely ESL.

ESL writers have a place in this industry; the problem is just that so many of them try to dupe prospective NES clients into believing that they're not ESL writers, because their work is likely to be completely useless to NES customers.

I managed to do it only gradually over the course of roughly a decade of writing for essay companies. Handling all of your own advertising and customer support isn't fun at all, but that's the price of independence. The two biggest benefits that make it worth doing are: (1) keeping 100% of the payments and (2) not having to be glued to computer screens whenever you're awake, just to get the jump on good projects before other writers can grab them off the assignment boards.

There's one legitimate use of fines by essay companies: as an incentive not to miss deadlines. If there are no consequences for missing deadlines, many writers will take advantage of that and end up costing their companies money, whether by losing clients or by precipitating legitimate demands for refunds. However, I'd agree that many companies misuse the mechanism of "fines" as an excuse to keep more money for themselves, without justification, which is obviously a ridiculous and shady unfair business practice that amounts to nothing more than theft from their writers.

Thank you...appreciated. I already explained to him why he doesn't need to worry about it or waste money having anybody rewrite it (including me); I just didn't want to explain the details publicly.

I'm going to answer your question via PM.

My guess is it's their company owners/principals, themselves.

Actually, black propaganda is the antithesis of "healthy" competition: in fact, it's about as good an example as there is of
unhealthy competition. The same goes for discrediting competitors with false rumors.

When I first signed up here in 2008, there were 3 other writers who were my strongest competition for the best (and most) projects at the same essay company: ResearchPro, Pheelyks, and ProfessorVerb and I competed for the same projects on the company boards and here, for direct clients. None of us ever disparaged another. We protected one another's unseen assignment-board requests at the company so that nobody else could steal those requests off the boards before whomever they were intended for saw them. We backed one another up in emergencies, and we referred private clients to one another in our respective specialties. If one of us sent a regular client to another writer because we couldn't squeeze in one project and, subsequently, that client came back to the referred writer instead of to his/her regular writer, we asked the client whether or not he/she had offered it to the first writer already; and/or we checked with one another before taking more work from one another's regular clients. When someone here who was in a beef with Pheelyks created a thread entitled "Pheelyks Versus Freelance Writer: A comparative analysis" https://essayscam.org/forum/es/pheelyks-versus-freelance-writer-comparative-analysis-3051/ , I could have simply kept my mouth shut while he absorbed as much damage as possible and let as many of his potential clients get steered straight over to me. It would have been free advertising for me in a way that I'd never have been allowed to post on my own behalf. Instead, I immediately posted in that thread and explained that I knew Phyleeks as a writer and that he was comparable to me and that I knew what someone else had posted about him in still another thread couldn't possibly be true because I knew that he didn't do business the way that person described. That, my friend, is "healthy competition," not using black propaganda or discrediting our competitors.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of search led you to them first and how did you find this forum only afterward?

This customer should simply have disputed the payment as soon as the writer started evading his questions and failed to furnish any evidence that the work was really in progress by the time the original deadline passed.

Unfortunately, that pretty much describes the vast majority of companies in this business.They offer prices that seem very competitive, except they don't actually provide anything or they provide completely useless garbage, often simply copied and pasted directly from whatever sources are loosely related to the topic of the assignment. They rip off their customers while also making the prices of legitimate companies and writers seem "high" to inexperienced customers who can't tell the difference between real essay providers and scam artists.

I can tell you that the website was definitely written by an ESL writer because it contains numerous elementary mistakes that no NES writer would ever make, especially any NES writer with a master's or PhD. On that note, any company whose website says that it only hires writers with master's and PhD degrees is lying to you from the start. Usually, I also try to check some of the samples, but their sample search box doesn't seem to work at all: whatever broad topic I search for generates absolutely nothing.

Nobody needs to pay a website for access to old essays just to come up with "ideas" for essays. University students can get whatever help they need for free from their professors and teaching assistants and from university writing centers. Likewise, paying a website for access to old essays hardly constitutes academic "research" and there are plenty of free and paid databases online (like Google Scholar, ProQuest, EBSCO, JSTOR, Gale/Cengage, and so forth).

Hello.

In more than 20 years of doing this kind of work, I have never bothered any of my clients in between projects; I wouldn't want any of my clients just "reaching out" to bother me with any emails unrelated to a specific project, either. They know exactly where to find me anytime they need projects and I'm not going to be spamming them with any kind of announcements that I've added some new area or expertise or skill. Once they use me, I'm pretty confident that they won't be looking elsewhere for future projects, strictly based on the quality of work that I provide.

Anybody can rent a mailbox and you can put whatever name or company name you want on it.

Trust me that I know exactly what you're trying to say: You and "CarlH" and two different "Alex" IDs and a few others are all here pretending to be "students" recommending the essay company for which you work. I'm just pointing that out because real students come here to try to find legitimate essay companies and writers (like me) and some of them might actually be inexperienced and gullible enough not to realize what you're doing. Not one of you is actually a student who has used the website that you're recommending and pretending to have used as a customer.

@Tyler1
1. There's 0.0 chance that you're from the US. (Because your English is obviously ESL.)
2. There's 0.0 chance that you're a "student." (Because real students don't come here after using a company to write 3 paragraphs about how great that company is.)

3. There's 0.0 chance that you're not someone associated with that ridiculous website. (Your "English" is identical to the "English" on that company's website and your entire post is obvious marketing spin parroting all the same BS that's on your website that no real student would ever write.)

Otherwise, your efforts to promote your website by pretending to be a satisfied customer are extremely impressive. Someone would need to have an IQ of at least 85 to see through your BS.

Curiously, the ELS English of this "Carl H" sounds identical to the ESL English of the website he's "reviewing." Everything about it screams scam, from the "testimonials" that all include the supposed full names of "satisfied clients" (because clients of academic essay companies are always extremely eager to publicize that they used essay companies as students and they're more than thrilled to have Google searches of their names bring up that connection for every prospective employer who Googles them for the foreseeable future), to the "100% money back guarantee" and the fact that you can't navigate the site for more than 5 seconds without being bombarded with offers to "chat" with company reps (or, more likely, bots) that want to "help" you place orders. Their "samples" are also terrible, although I'm sure they're much better than anything you'd actually get from them.

Where did you find them in the first place and what was it that convinced you to trust them? Nothing more than a quick check of their sample essays should have been enough to steer you far away.

Yes, pressuring clients to place orders is another red flag. Unless someone is inquiring about a rush deadline where time really is a legitimate issue and there's no time to spare if they need it by that deadline, I just tell them how long I'll honor my price quote for the quoted deadline. If an essay provider tries to pressure you to place an order for an ordinary deadline, that's usually a bad sign. If new prospective clients tell me that they're going to look for someone cheaper, I just tell them that they're more than welcome to try me some other time and/or that I'll be happy to (re)do the project if they discover for themselves what quality of work they're likely to get at "bargain" prices in this industry.

jamesmith ☲ - | 1 Company Representative 7 hrs ago | #6

"JamesSmith" accidentally disclosed that he's really a company representative while pretending to be a satisfied customer.

Quick responses actually aren't necessarily a red flag: I typically respond to inquiries and to existing clients within minutes of receiving their emails unless I'm out or sleeping because I'm usually in front of a screen 16+ hours/day.


This is always a red flag, whether it's on an essay company website or from someone here claiming to "know" how some essay company does business (which also means that person is really just a shill for that company pretending not to be). As I've explained many times, essay companies don't "assign" projects to writers and most of them don't put any limitation on what projects can be viewed (and taken) by any writer with access to their assignment boards. Company writers with zero experience in a particular area often take projects that they really have no business taking. Companies usually play no role in that process and don't even keep track of what projects get taken by what writers. Unless there's a complaint about a project after delivery, companies have no idea which writers are taking which projects: they just list all of their available projects on assignment boards and they pay writers for all of the assignments they've uploaded to the system every month.


Excessive politeness during the inquiry stage is often a red flag. Busy writers who actually have to provide good work on every project just don't have the time (and/or patience) to entertain lengthy email exchanges. Typically, we ask for all of the necessary information needed to price a project and we address specific questions; but we usually don't have time to go through endless exchanges or to jump through hoops to get your new business. Scammers have all the time in the world to gain your confidence (hence the term "conman"), simply because that's their entire job. By contrast, legit writers actually have to write every project we book; so we're not going to have as much time to sell you on our services to get your business.

For example, if you continue asking me questions that are already fully addressed in my FAQs after the first time I ask you to read my FAQs before asking more questions, and/or if you make me email to ask you the same questions more than once, that's where you'll notice my annoyance in the tone of my emails, right there. Conversely, when you're dealing with a scammer, there's almost no limit to how long they'll keep up the impeccable customer-service tone or to how friendly and excessively polite they'll continue to be, until they have your money in their hands. That will all flip on a dime the first time you ask about canceling your order (even minutes after paying for it) and, especially, once you have any complaint about the product after it's delivered. The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde routine is extremely common and that transition happens the instant they have their hands on your money.

That site is a little more dangerous than the other sites that typically generate these kinds of complaints here, because it appears to have been written by a native English speaker, which usually isn't the case. As an experienced writer who's been doing this for a iving for more than 20 years, I can still recognize some red flags (such as the obvious identical copied/pasted language under the tabs for different types of projects); but I wouldn't blame a typical new client for missing them. Usually, as soon as I check the website, I'm completely amazed that anybody could possibly not realize that a website supposedly providing high-level professional writing in the English language should be able to put together something whose website text sounds like actual English.

Inexperienced readers of this forum should know that Posts # 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, and 69 were all authored by employees of the company being discussed pretending to be satisfied customers; and judging from that "English," it's all the same person under 7 different IDs. In one of them (68), the author forgot that he was pretending to be a "student" and actually identified himself as a "company representative."

Does this mean that you'd also like to have all of your bad grammar, ridiculous punctuation, and totally incorrect English word (and idiomatic expression) usage pointed out on a regular basis? I don't normally criticize anybody's bad grammar here (unless that person raises the issue first, by presuming to criticize or ridicule others), but I'm quite willing to start with your posts if you'd like me to do that. Trust me, I've been tempted many times.