As I (and others) have explained before, experienced writers who are very busy because we're good at what we do have ZERO time to deal with anything other than full payment in advance, and for exactly this reason:


This doesn't work, either:


The problem is the writer has already wasted the time writing the project, and that's time that the writer can't recover by "not submitting it" if the customer doesn't pay for it. A busy writer with deadlines almost every day of his life (and multiple deadlines on many days) just can't afford to waste time writing unpaid projects, especially when that might mean turning away other projects that are paid for in full in advance. I know of no essay companies that accept "down-payments," either. Payment in full at the time the order is placed has been the standard practice in this industry forever. In fact, I'd suggest that you're also more likely to get ripped off by anybody willing to agree to write ANYTHING before it's paid for in full, because scammers are happy to take whatever you're willing to pay them since they're not actually going to be writing the project, anyway. Busy legitimate writers can't take any chance of writing something before it's paid for in full.

A "down-payment" to a stranger presents EXACTLY the same risk to the customer as paying in advance, and by using a writer who is desperate enough to agree to write anything before it's paid for in full, the customer is dramatically increasing the chances that the writer he or she chooses won't be very good. Presumably, customers want the best writers they can find, not desperate newbies who need clients badly enough to agree to anything less than full payment in advance. The way you protect yourself is you take pay the same amount of money as that "down-payment" and you simply order and pay for a shorter project. Your chances of getting ripped off on that transaction are no greater than paying the same amount to a stranger as a "down-payment" and you're increasing your chances of finding a really good writer. Just test out the writer with a short project before you trust someone with payment for a much longer project. If you don't already have a relationship with a good writer by the time you need a large project, you simply order it in smaller sections and you pay for each section in advance at the time you order it. Those are the only reliable ways of limiting your risk initially and making sure that the person you're dealing with isn't going to rip you off or send you work that's so bad it's useless to you.

My clients own exclusive copyright to any project that they purchase from me, so it's absolutely none of my business how they use those projects or what they choose to do with them, nor would I ever have any way of knowing what they do with my work. However, the codes of academic honesty in effect at every academic institution in existence clearly and expressly prohibit turning in projects completed by anyone other than the student receiving credit for those projects.


If you were to ask any professors, the line isn't the least bit "blurred." There isn't a college professor on the planet who allows students to submit essays written by someone else. By suggesting otherwise, you could be exposing naive clients to very difficult circumstances if they were to read and believe what you're saying about this.

The most expensive providers are usually those that advertise the lowest rates. That's because they invariably provide such bad work that customers who were hoping to save money by using them end up having to start all over with another provider, and as often as not, by that time, it's a much shorter deadline. So, they have to pay for a shorter deadline from a better writer in addition to the money they already wasted on the first "bargain" priced writer. This exact scenario happens to me about once a month after a prospective client requests a price quote from me and I never hear back about it until a few weeks later, when I get an email from the same person asking me either for a price quote to "fix" the horrible work provided by the cheaper provider or for a new price quote for the same project but with a much shorter deadline. I don't think there's ever been a single one of those cases where the first essay they received could possibly have been "fixed" without more work than just writing the entire project from scratch.

How has the pandemic changed anything for writers already working from home and for students who still get just as many writing assignments but now attend classes virtually instead of in person?

I noticed only a small drop in volume last spring, resulting in a slightly slower busy season and only a small drop in volume during the summer compared with recent summer seasons.


Interesting. Any idea what contributed to that increase?

Ironically, there's no apostrophe in apostrophes.

In what ways?

Clients can't ever just "change" the deadline on the writer to one that is earlier than the deadline that was originally quoted by the writer any more than writers can ever just "change" the agreed-upon deadline on the client to delay delivery. If the deadline is already a very long one, writers might allow it, strictly it as a courtesy, because it may not matter to them. However, clients can't ever just demand an earlier deadline; they can ask for an earlier deadline and they should be fully prepared to issue additional payment for anything that deviates from the exact specs (including deadline) that was originally quoted by the writer and agreed to at the time of the original transaction. This is equally true for clients of essay companies. Suggesting otherwise is completely ridiculous and isn't doing writers or inexperienced clients who read your posts any favors, because it promotes ridiculous expectations that are contrary to both common sense and long-standing norms in this industry. As a matter of fact, it contradicts the norms of every industry in which deadlines or completion dates are issues, not to mention the most basic law (and rationale) of contracts.

No client would ever expect or be OK with a writer emailing to say "Hi. So, I know we agreed on a due date of the 10th, but it turns out that my I misread my schedule and won't be able to deliver this until the 15th. Hope you don't mind" Same goes for clients changing specs on writers after payment. Everybody sometimes makes mistakes; but if it's your mistake, you have no right to make that someone else's problem. The most you can do in that situation is communicate your changed deadline ASAP and understand that it will probably affect the price. Earlier deadline requests can usually be accommodated, but that's something that requires a negotiation and only the most basic understanding of what it means to to make an agreement with someone else about almost anything, even without getting into any technicalities of contract law.

Apparently, Admin here chose to remove the accusatory post that preceded (what is now) Post #9 in this old thread to which Post #9 was a direct response. They also removed the quotes within Post #9 that gave it context.

Quite clearly.


My point wasn't that one should never add any new relevant thought to an old thread just because it was started (and/or last posted in 4 or 5 years ago). My point was simply that it sounds really silly to address one's new thoughts directly to the OP in 2018 when the thread was started in 2011, the most recent previous post was in 2013, and the OP's last activity anywhere on this forum was in 2014. Anybody involved in any way in this industry (except, perhaps, as a customer) should be fully capable of expressing the same thought objectively and from the third-person perspective.

In my experience, many of them don't even join this forum until a day or two before their due date when they first start Googling for essay writing help. They have no idea who's a legit writer and who's a scam and they don't have time to spend hours reading through years of threads. They figure it's a forum where they can just ask someone for help finding a good writer. They may still spend some time reading threads while waiting for responses and/or to read about certain writers or companies after getting some responses; but they probably figure they might as well just ask for help in the meantime, as their first step.

I get inquiries like that fairly regularly, and about half the time, it's actually from someone who asked me to provide a price quote for the project first, before opting for someone cheaper. Typically, they come back to me about a week or two later, after receiving complete garbage for their money and there's nothing remotely usable in that mess to "edit" into something decent. So after declining my services (initially), then paying someone about 50% to 75% of my original price quote for total garbage, they end up paying me to do the whole project from scratch. On about half of those occasions, by the time they contact me for help, it's a rush project due in a day or two, and in addition to paying me even more than my original quote that they declined to pay, they've also wasted whatever they paid to find out for themselves why I'm more expensive than whatever service they decided to try out first, hoping to save some money. I'd say that this exact scenario happens approximately 10 times every year.

I highly doubt that many students willing to pay for a good freelance writer are expecting to have to do any rewriting of the work they receive. That's something that's probably necessary only when they order from cheaper inexperienced (and plain old bad) writers and from many companies that employ inexperienced and/or ESL writers. The whole point of hiring a really good NES writer is for the piece of mind of knowing that they will receive a high-quality piece of work that requires no rewriting.

I don't do anything to alter my normal patterns of expression and I've been very open about the fact that I don't use Facebook or Twitter or text, and that I don't even own a smartphone. None of that seems to have affected my ability to get new clients. Quite the contrary, actually. Plenty of my clients have specifically mentioned that they chose me based on the substantive content of my forum posts and on their comparison of the way I express myself in written English to the way other writers express themselves here.


That hasn't been my experience at all. I don't know where you get your information or why this conclusion makes sense to you, but most students probably prefer doing business with an experienced, serious-sounding and businesslike writer who's been in this business for decades and who's produced about 10,000 essays during that time than with someone who was still playing beer pong in a fraternity until recently and who's really not much more experienced writing essays than the typical client.


I've managed to remain competitive in this business without doing anything to pretend that I'm younger (or older) than I really am. My guess is that most clients just want to deal with writers who aren't misrepresenting anything about themselves. Even my website and my advertising material mention that I've been writing academic essays professionally for 20 years, which makes it quite obvious that I'm well over twice the age of most of my clients. My guess is that they're much more likely to consider that a good thing that inspires some confidence rather than a bad thing that alienates them.


That's probably true for actors, not for writers.

Honest advertising and guerrilla advertising are totally different things, mainly because the latter is fundamentally deceptive and dishonest while the former involves nothing to "cover up."

Instead of wasting your time worrying endlessly about plagiarism scanners, prospective customers should just devote their efforts to doing the simple research to identify good legitimate writers whose work they won't have to worry about being plagiarized. This forum provides plenty of information in that regard, especially if you learn how to use the search function properly (by changing the default "titles" to "messages"). It would be impossible for any writer who plagiarizes to continue operating here for many years, especially under the same ID.

I believe this is largely a moot point, simply because almost anybody who writes for essay companies also takes work from direct clients whenever possible. This is equally true for writers who are highly talented and extremely experienced and for writers whose work is atrocious and who really have no business charging anybody money for their writing in the first place. The best essay-company writers eventually manage to cultivate a sufficiently large clientele that they no longer need to take any company projects at all. So, to the extent the point isn't moot, I'd suggest that it's only at the two far ends of the quality spectrum: writers who are good enough to make a living without relying on any essay-company work are probably the best of the best; conversely, the worst of the worst are probably writers who can't even get hired by any essay companies. In between those two extremes, whenever you receive work from an essay company, it's almost always written by someone who also takes direct freelance work, and whenever you receive work from an independent writer, it's almost always written by someone who also writes for essay companies.

Actually, if COVID-19 has changed anything, I'd imagine that it has only flooded the market with totally unqualified inexperienced "writers" who are now trying desperately to find a new way to earn some income.


Both legitimate and scam essay companies are usually run by people working from home on their computers, not in brick-and-mortar office buildings. What's the connection, in your mind, between the pandemic and the supposed demise of scam companies that already work from home and have had no real changes in their overhead?


The only real change in education is that classes have shifted substantially to the online medium. This will also change the way exams are given, but I can't imagine what changes you're talking about as far as assigned writing projects are concerned. Would you care to explain your theory?


As I've said, those companies (as well as most if not all legitimate companies) are already run by people working from home. Scam companies involved in blackmailing customers don't even have to worry about actually providing the projects for which they're paid. What is it about the pandemic that you think makes it any harder for them to perpetuate the same exact scams that they're already executing from their homes?

The only problem with that theory when it comes to essay companies is that those companies typically have only one pool of writers. Projects all get posted on the exact same assignment board, regardless of which of their customer-facing websites handled the order. It isn't the case that each of them maintains a different pool of writers taking orders off a different assignment board depending on which of their websites sold the project.

It's not really any more difficult to identify a legitimate (and good) essay provider than it is to identify a good restaurant: in both cases, you read what previous customers have had to say about them and, based on your reading, you try out one of them at minimal cost. You wouldn't book a restaurant venue for an expensive or important event without trying out the place for a snack or a small meal for one or two people, first. The same holds true for essay providers: you simply pick one based on your reading and you order a very small project of a few pages (or even just one or two pages) for a relatively unimportant project with a long deadline.

You can narrow down your list of candidates very quickly through your initial reading, but you can't really know what you're going to get until you actually place an order. When it comes to ordering from companies (vs. freelance writers), your test project may not be as helpful in that process, because you also have to consider that they have hundreds of writers who vary tremendously in talent, experience, ability, and (more often than not), in their language of origin. Still, the small test project will allow you to confirm that the entity you're testing does, in fact, deliver a product when you place an order.

When it comes to restaurants, you would start your research reading published restaurant reviews and Yelp comments from real customers. There aren't really any disinterested and independent reviews published about this industry; however, since you're already on this forum, you definitely can (and should) use the search function here to familiarize yourself with the reputations of essay providers dating back to their first appearance on this forum. To do that effectively, you always have to change the default "Topic Titles" to "Messages" to generate useful results. In some cases, there are also review threads here with comments from actual clients on this forum. Depending (mainly) on how old those comments are, you can even contact some of those clients through the messaging system here. Some of us have been here for well over a decade with only very positive comments from real customers who have chosen to leave comments about our work. Let me suggest that it would be just about impossible for a writer to exist on this forum under the same ID for a decade or more while delivering plagiarized content without complaints from customers.

By the time you've gone through that initial vetting process, you'll likely be able to narrow down your search quite effectively, already. If you also remember that cheap restaurants and essay providers are almost never going to be as good as relatively expensive restaurants and essay providers, you have a very good chance of finding the right writer for the rest of your academic career just by ordering that first two-page essay as your test project. If you really want to keep the expense of your test to a minimum, just skip the test of the cheapest providers you can find instead of wasting your money on them before trying out someone at the higher end of the price spectrum. Don't order a whole project from a cheap provider as a test; order one or two pages from the provider who is probably most likely to deliver work of very high quality.

I disagree. If one just learns how to use the search function properly, it can save a lot of time, especially since what most new members want to know more than anything else is simply which writing services are legitimate and reliable and which ones are either outright scams or just unreliable and/or inconsistent. To use the search function here properly, you have to change the default "Topic Titles" to "Messages." If you don't do that, your results will exclude every mention of any writer or company that doesn't include that specific search term in the titles of existing threads. That would be the most efficient first step, because you can always start a new thread, if necessary, anytime your initial search for existing threads mentioning any writer (or any other searchable term) doesn't generate helpful results.

I don't necessarily have any opinion about whether or not professors are "slackers," but why would the online medium for classes change anything about that?

The TOS of most essay companies expressly retain copyright instead of transferring it to the client and expressly prohibit any use of their essays for anything whatsoever except "studying" it and "citing" it as a reference in any academic work submitted for academic credit.

The entire premise of this thread is ridiculous, because it implies that the concern about ripoffs only matters to the extent it affects American (and other NES) customers. If the implication is that only American and British students care that their providers aren't ESL writers masquerading as NES writers, that's also a specious argument. It might be true that some ESL clients prefer lower-level writing; but in my 20 years of experience, even the vast majority of ESL clients specifically prefer higher-level NES writing, even if it's way above their own writing level. In fact, one of the reasons that many of them choose to spend so much on the best NES writers is, precisely, that they want the best possible product that they can find.

The only mystery is that the OP actually got 4 essays from the writer, first. This is exceptionally unusual, because scammers masquerading as writers don't usually provide satisfactory essays before perpetrating their scams; and legitimate writers who actually provide the work for which they're paid don't suddenly decide to scam people instead of producing essays. I'm guessing that the "writer" in question was actually one of those middlemen pretending to be a client to a legitimate writer and pretending to be a writer to a customer and ripping off both of them. Plenty of them have contacted me over the years pretending to be students and asking me to provide work first and take payment afterwards. There's always something obvious that exposes them, either in something they write (or copy/paste) in their emails or in the way that there's always a very suspicious delay before they can answer a basic question about the project (because they have to relay that question and the response to and from the actual client to answer my questions). In this case, the scammer probably ripped off a desperate writer for the first 4 projects and got as much work out of that writer as he could before the writer refused to provide any more work without payment, so the scammer just kept the money because he couldn't find another real writer to rip off to perpetuate the scam on the client.

Great first post. Welcome to the forum.

They might upload your original essay to turnitin just to try to screw you; but, presumably, you already did this first when you submitted it. If anybody were to question you, your response should be that you ordered a model essay to help you figure out how to improve your essay and when you tried to cancel the order, they responded by threatening you and they submitted your original essay to turnitin. You have the date of your original submission, which is earlier than the earliest date that they could have submitted your original essay, and you have the emails and credit card statement to prove the dates.


Correct. Unless or until you actually submit something that you didn't write to your professor, you haven't violated any school honor code. You tried to purchase a model essay and you never even received it. It doesn't violate any honor code to purchase a model essay and nobody can say what you were intending to do with it if you had received it. If you're asked, you were planning on using it to learn how to improve your own essay.


Obviously nonsense. They're not refunding your payment and they know that you're not going to contact the VC to ask about a refund sent by an essay company. If they were going to issue a refund, they'd have simply issued it to you and at least (possibly) preserved some kind of relationship with you for future business. It makes no sense for them to give back the money but in a way that ensures that you can't get it and that guarantees that you never do business with them again. If they were going to refund it, they'd have refunded it to you. They're not issuing any refund.

If you don't think that you can fix your essay satisfactorily on your own, your best bet would probably be to use the info available on this forum -- as long as you're here, now -- to find yourself a trustworthy provider to write you a brand new essay, using your original only for the topic and as a sample of your writing level and style.

The short answer is if you already submitted the work that you purchased, don't pursue the refund and don't publish their name or do anything to antagonize them into being vindictive. Move on, learn from your mistake, and next time, just use this forum to find a legitimate writer. If you never submitted anything that you purchased, post the name of the company right here, ignore their threats, and pursue the refund through PayPal or your credit card company. If they actually try to follow through by contacting your school, you have all of the chats and/or emails showing that you tried to cancel the order and your (truthful) position is that you were going to order a model essay to help you fix your essay, but you never submitted anything purchased from anybody. They may give you dirty looks and warn you about not writing your own essays, but there's no actual violation for them to pursue against you.



This is extremely typical: They're as cheerful and as helpful-sounding as they could possibly be until they have your money. It's all an act. As soon as you have any kind of problem with their work (or simply change your mind right after payment), you'll immediately see their true colors. They also make things difficult for legitimate writers because some of the best of us tend to be a little (or a lot) less patient about holding the hands of new prospective clients. Some clients end up choosing the friendly-sounding rip-off artists after contacting us, based mainly on their phony friendliness act and on their too-good-to-be-true prices. Those of us who actually provide a high-quality product and charge fairly for that quality are usually way too busy for hand-holding and/or for responding patiently to questions already very clearly answered in our FAQs (for one example of how this dynamic typically comes up). I know for a fact that some of my current clients tried out some of those places after contacting both of us, initially, before they decided to start using me, instead.



If you wrote the original essay, you can totally ignore their threats. There's no such thing as "attempted" plagiarism and you haven't violated any university honor code by ordering a model essay that you haven't ever actually submitted for a grade. If this is the situation, you should immediately post the name of the company here for the benefit of everybody else who wants to avoid getting scammed and/or blackmailed by fraudulent companies.


This is a mistake without any possible benefit to you. Don't do it. Your fellow students don't really know anything more than you do about this and those who might definitely aren't ever going to admit that in a Student-Union forum. Meanwhile, you'd be divulging things about yourself to relative (or total) strangers at your school for absolutely no good reason.

Same here.


Ditto. I have yet to receive one of these inquiries without glaring mistakes of grammar and/or idiomatic expression.

Yup. The names they use are always laughably obvious fabrications.

In my experience, the only writers who can ever "negotiate" the price of projects with essay companies are those writers already considered by the company to be their very best writers. Even then, the companies for which I've worked will only negotiate prices on projects that are uniquely difficult or time consuming. When it comes to ordinary projects, companies would rather just have a random writer complete the project than pay one of their top writers more for the same project. Writers who are exceptionally qualified and/or experienced and/or who have advanced degrees in very desirable fields would probably be much better advised to negotiate to start off at the highest payment rate usually only offered by companies to their best and most senior proven writers than to try negotiating the prices of specific projects. That's exactly what I did when I started writing for companies back in 2003.

Once in a while, I emailed the company to explain that a specific project posted on the assignment board probably wasn't going to get taken because the posted payout wasn't sufficient for the amount of work that project required, and they usually responded by offering me a higher payout for it or by asking me what price I had in mind. But I'm pretty sure that if I tried to "negotiate" for higher prices on ordinary projects, they'd have refused and the tone of that refusal would probably have reflected some rightful annoyance on their part, notwithstanding that they definitely considered me one of their top writers (out of hundreds) and that they used to offer me various special projects (such as for their friends and family) at a much higher price than normal and outside of the normal process of posting projects on the assignment board.

Busy writers don't have time to write free "summaries" for every prospective client with an inquiry. Only inexperienced fledgling writers who desperately need their first clients have that kind of time to spare. As always, unless you're content to limit yourself to the least-experienced writers (many of whom will soon find out that they aren't good enough to do this for a living in the first place and won't be able to provide a high-quality product), the only realistic way to test a writer before you pay for a substantial project is to pay for a very short project, first. If you want to make that first test a paid one-page "summary" of a suggested approach to your project, that's fine; just don't expect any good writer who already does this for a living with any degree of success to write anything of that nature for free to prove his abilities to you.

In my opinion, the only issue relating to "deception" that readers of this forum really care about pertains to deceptions perpetrated by fraudulent and incompetent essay providers on their clients. In that respect, there are essay providers who are totally honest about their experience, abilities, and language of origin who actually deliver the high-quality product that they promise to deliver and essay providers who are dishonest about their experience, abilities, and language of origin who fail to deliver the high-quality product that they promise to deliver (or any product at all). That's the main reason prospective customers new to this industry read this forum in the first place.

Instructions from professors play absolutely no role whatsoever in determining my writing style. I've written everything from grade-school-level essays (ordered by parents) and routine high-school projects to postgraduate dissertations, professional white papers, executive correspondence, grievance letters, patent applications, and commercial promotional materials. Obviously, opinion pieces for high school or freshman-level English Composition are written very differently than heavily-researched postgraduate theses or dissertations; but those differences have nothing to do with writing "styles," nor do specific instructions dictating how to structure projects or individual paragraphs within those projects.

As a professional with roughly 10,000 projects under my belt by now, I'm also quite conscious and deliberate about the writing style I choose to use, based on the type of project, the subject matter involved, and the level of scholarship and appropriate English-proficiency level. Sometimes, that means writing something in perfect and articulate English and in complex sentences, but without a level of analysis that's unrealistic for the level of scholarship; other times, it means writing at a much higher level of scholarship but in deliberately-imperfect English, such as where a highly-educated ESL client with limited English-language proficiency specifically requests something appropriate to the PhD level but written roughly at the same writing level as his or her proposal or outline or writing sample. About the only time I write anything for work without conscious attention to my writing style is where the client tells me to "just do your best" and/or "don't hold back from your best." I always ask about that if the client doesn't specify, because something that I write in a way that might be perfectly natural for me and perfectly appropriate for high-level students might not be suitable at all for many of my clients, especially if their own writing level is ESL.

I've never encountered a single UK student who didn't care whether I used UK or US English in his project. They always make it a point to specify, and on the rare occasion that I accidentally used US English for a UK client, I always received an immediate request for a revision, which I provided quickly, along with my apology. In my experience, US students don't want their projects written in UK English, either.

As long as the information is properly referenced, there should be no problem citing sources within sources. The problem only arises when someone tries to misrepresent the information as having come from the original source when it really came from a secondary source.

It's not at all difficult to differentiate between flagged similarities that are probably innocent because they're merely coincidental and flagged similarities that reveal very obvious plagiarism. Professors don't bother with random parts of sentences (or even whole short sentences) here and there, especially if they relate to historical fact that has been written about countless times. No professor is worried about a sentence that says "World War Two started on September 1st 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland" if that comes up flagged, because they understand that there's probably no way to express that fact that hasn't already been written many times. Regardless of how many papers are stored by those scanners, it's always obvious plagiarism when entire blocks of text get flagged because they were copied either verbatim or nearly verbatim with only very superficial wording changes as an attempt to conceal their similarity. Plagiarism scanners don't just highlight the flagged text; they actually provide the original source from where flagged text was copied. The more papers stored in those systems, the more difficult it is to try to sneak anything past them. They're not going to become any less useful as they accumulate more and more written work against which scanned writing is compared; they're just going to continue getting more and more difficult to beat..

Just ignore them. If you haven't already submitted their work for credit, there's really nothing for them to report. You ordered a model essay to help you learn how to write your own essay.

Presumably, the purpose of the "sample" is for their customers to review their work and then decide whether or not to order and purchase the entire project. You read the sample and decided not to go ahead with the order based on the sample. At most, offer to pay them only for the portion of the project that they already delivered, mainly for your peace of mind.

Good riddance. I've had a few prospective clients ask whether I accepted bitcoin and then I never heard from them again after I said no.

Unless you're dealing with a writer recommended by someone you know personally, you can't ever really be sure until you try out a given writer for yourself. Just minimize your risk by ordering something very small before you trust someone with a large payment.

Once you're on this forum with access to all the info available through the search function, it shouldn't take you much longer than 10 minutes to find a legitimate writer who won't rip you off.