I just took a quick look at their main page and found that there (literally) isn't a single sentence on it without glaring mistakes. It's very obviously just bad ESL writing that, curiously, looks very similar to the English of the "observer" who contributed the post immediately above this one as his only post on this forum.

Just out of curiosity, does that mean they disclosed that information to you in response to your application or does that mean that they just rejected your application and you figured out the reason for yourself?

Several very fishy things about this whole thread: (1) Students who aren't in the market for writing services don't usually post on this forum to announce that they're not interested in writing services while also (2) publicly posting all of the exact details of their assignments. (3) The response immediately above this one (#15) is authored by someone who is, supposedly, a "student"; but he or she seems to be referring to details about the completed essay despite the fact that the OP never posted anything besides the supposed grade. (4) The supposed "student" who authored the post immediately above this one obviously seems to be offering writing services.

Why would any writer ever provide free revisions based on requests that weren't in the original instructions for the project?

Really? How many times did they have to go back to court to get the case heard and what was the outcome? What percentage of any writer's clients do you suppose happen to live within a few-hour drive of where the writer lives? How do you suggest writers who don't happen to live in the same state as their non-paying clients go about suing them and then collecting on the judgment if they win? At most, 5%-10% of my American clients live in NY and approximately 50% of my clients don't even live in this country. How do you imagine I would "sue" clients who live out of state and/or abroad? Most projects are worth only a few hundred dollars or less. How many of those projects do you imagine a busy writer with multiple deadlines every day during most weeks of the year can possibly afford to chase down for payment after delivery?


It's never an issue if you always require full payment in advance. It's an issue that will definitely come up repeatedly (and way too often to deal with) if you provide any work before payment. No writer who does this as a fulltime job can afford to take the risk of having to waste time and money chasing after non-paying clients. That's why experienced fulltime writers never allow anything less than full payment in advance. The only sensible and workable way that clients can "build trust" with a writer is by ordering a very small project first, even a single page if you're that worried about it. Someone will always have to take the risk associated with that first project; but busy writers with constant deadlines simply can't afford to deal with clients who won't even trust them with pre-payment for a one-page or two-page project. Of course, clients can reduce that risk to an absolute minimum by using resources (such as this website) to identify writers who are unlikely to be scams in the first place. Conversely, there's no such thing as any website or forum that allows writers to review the reputations of new clients.

Furthermore, on that note, clients only have to do research once to identify a legitimate writer; meanwhile, a busy writer might have 100 or 200 different clients (and twice that many prospective clients) every year. How much time do you imagine a busy writer can afford to spend researching every new prospective client to determine whether or not that client can be trusted to pay after delivery and how would you suggest writers go about that process? Those are just some of the most obvious reasons that clients who want a good, highly-experienced professional writer are just going to have to accept that payment after delivery is not an option. You might find some people who call themselves "writers" who are willing to provide work before payment, but they're invariably going to be inexperienced fledgling writers and people who just dabble in this business as a side-gig or as something they try to do to earn money in between real jobs.

What other types of writing have you been doing?

Just out of curiosity, how do you define and distinguish "need" for "assistance" and "ill intentions" in this context?

Nowadays, people go to school 12 months out of the year, especially when they get their degrees online. Once you have an established clientele, regular work comes in all the time, although somewhat less than you might want during the typical slow months and somewhat more than you might want during the peaks of the typical busy seasons.

You're still totally misunderstanding. Nobody would ever request "merely changing" the citations and sources, because that would be a total waste of effort with absolutely no sensible purpose. Any plagiarized text and/or any material being reused from an earlier project that has already been scanned would immediately get flagged and whatever sources (or project) that material came from identified and linked in that scan. When clients order these types of projects, the whole point of the project is to rewrite all of the text in completely different words so that it will pass a plagiarism scan as original writing.

If they're from the US, it's not "vaguely" enforceable because blackmail and extortion are both very serious crimes. All you would have to do is call your local police and/or the local FBI field office and provide the name of the company and the emails. You may still prefer not to do that to avoid publicity linked to your name, but it has nothing to do with whether or not blackmail is an enforceable charge against a US entity.


Don't take that gamble. The creeps who run those companies can be very vindictive, and it would hardly take them much more time than sending an email. They could probably figure out who your professor is from the assignment materials, or they could go the much simpler route by looking up the Dean of Students and provide your name along with the emails, assignment details, and the project they provided.


A target for whom? The school? They're not students attending the school, so there are no consequences to them, even if they're located in the US. If they're in the US, they've already blackmailed you, which is a serious crime. However, if your main interest is simply avoiding being accused of cheating by your school, your best bet would probably be not to use the product at all and just do a better job of identifying a legitimate provider next time.

That's because "editing" jobs ordinarily imply copyediting and very light line-editing. Typically, whenever clients send me projects requesting only "editing," they usually require nearly-complete rewriting to produce anything decent that fulfills the project specs. About 10% of the time, projects sent to me for "editing" really need only copyediting and/or light line-editing. In 20 years of doing this, I've had only 2 or 3 projects sent to me that needed such light editing that I responded by telling those clients to save their money, just do a spellcheck and proofread it for punctuation mistakes themselves, and contact me in the future when they have a project worth paying me to do for them. One or two of them paid me to do that for them anyway and the other one or two took my advice.

One of my History professors started off the first day of class by telling the rest of the class to take a good look at me because they wouldn't be seeing me again for the rest of the semester, despite being one of his best students. I'd taken all of his classes because his entire course grade was based on a final written project and received an A the first few times without ever having gone to a single class after picking up the syllabus and final-paper options on the first day of class. After he realized that's why I was taking all of his classes, he just started giving me a B with a slash through the A and the word "class attendance" next to the B.

I just had a series of these and charged the same as for all-new writing. The client had to have his original drafts revised instead of a brand-new project, because the professor reviewed all the drafts and graded the project based on its "evolution" and degree of improvement between the drafts and the final versions. On my end, it's actually more work to "revise" someone else's work extensively than it is to write the whole project from scratch. Writing flows smoothly, whereas rewriting someone else's work involves constant stops and starts to go back and forth between the original draft and the version that I'm writing.

If you didn't actually use the paper they provided, there are probably no immediate academic consequences to you even if they do contact your professor.

Unlike criminal law, where the mere attempt to commit some crimes is an offense in and of itself, there's no such thing as "attempted" academic dishonesty if you didn't actually submit someone else's work for credit, even if you purchased an essay with that intention, originally.

If they're not actually extorting you for more money and/or you did use any part of their work, your smartest move to avoid having to deal with the accusation would probably be to just cut your losses and remove the bad review.

This might be your smartest move either way, because whether or not their reporting you has any immediate academic consequences, they could still simply publish all of your emails and the essay together with your name and email.

If they do that, any future prospective employer who Googles your name will find that, and unlike your school, they probably would consider that and avoid hiring you because of it, especially since they don't have to disclose to you why they didn't hire you.

If they do extort you for more money, you should contact law enforcement wherever the company is located, which, unfortunately, could be a waste of time depending on where they are, if they're outside of the U.S.

The main function of these "chat representatives" at most of the essay companies that use them is just to sell projects to hesitant customers after their initial inquiry and to convince them to place their orders and pay for them. Once they have your money, their whole demeanor and tone typically changes dramatically, but never as much as when customers express dissatisfaction with the quality of the work they eventually receive. All you have to do to find examples of some of those exchanges is use the search function here for the words "chat log" (after you change the default "Topic Titles" to "Messages").

Academic writing really isn't all that difficult or "technical"; after all, every assignment is something that students are expected to be able to produce on their own. An ESL writer looking to break into this industry should simply start off writing undergraduate projects for ESL clients. Just don't take projects from NES clients, especially without fully disclosing to them, in advance, that English isn't your primary language. Your NES clients will realize that for themselves as soon as they read your work; so just avoid problems and accusations by being honest about your language skills up front.

There's nothing wrong, necessarily, with having a polished fully-functional website, obviously. The point, however, is that some of the worst of the worst scam companies in this industry put a ton of money into their websites for the specific purposes of presenting the appearance of legitimacy and of masking the fact that they provide either an unusably-bad product or nothing at all after receiving your money. Some of them are easily identifiable, anyway, simply because the English in their web copy is atrocious. The most dangerous of these have figured out that horrible ESL English is a dead giveaway, so they've also put money into having real NES writers provide their web copy.

That's a totally different situation than this thread topic. When a client asks me to "un-plagiarize" a project, it's either: (1) an essay that someone else wrote for the same course previously that got an A, or (2) material that the student mostly copied and pasted directly from sources that needs to be paraphrased and cited properly. Neither of those is a problem or particularly "complex" and usually requires little if any time to do the usual research. If a client sends me a draft of a project with a request to upgrade the writing, that's no problem, either, provided it already makes sense, substantively. What you're talking about is a draft that doesn't make substantive sense in the first place, which would be a futile endeavor. If I don't think the original draft makes sense, I'll refuse to do anything but write the whole project from scratch, because I just don't have the time to waste figuring out (or asking) what every nonsensical point is supposed to mean and I definitely don't want to be blamed for the inevitable poor results attributable to the major flaws in the original draft after rewriting a bunch of nonsense, just in much better English. I'd rather tell that client to let me redo the entire project or just contact me before trying to write the draft next time.

Properly-cited direct quotes don't count as plagiarism and should be deleted from the file you submit for scanning so that you get back an accurate scan. That doesn't mean that there should be extensive use of quotes, but that's a different issue from plagiarism. Extensive (and unnecessary) use of quotes is characteristic of students and inexperienced fledgling writers struggling to satisfy word counts. I've seen undergraduate essays written by students that were almost nothing but large block quotes with very little actual "writing" (let alone analysis) in between them. Most academic projects don't require any direct quotes at all.

Agreed.

As I've suggested before, this forum provides a wealth of valuable information to help inexperienced clients identify legitimate service providers and to distinguish us from the illegitimate hacks who can barely compose coherent forum posts, let alone complex academic projects, as well as outright plagiarists, non-deliverers, and various other total rip-offs. The search function works well if you change the default "topic titles" to messages" and some service-review threads include the active forum IDs of previous clients, some of whom can be contacted privately through PMs for greater details about their experiences with both excellent and horrible providers that they've already used. Practically every provider has been discussed and reviewed, for better or worse, somewhere on this forum.

If I had ever been "fined" by an essay company, that would have been my last project for that company.

In almost 20 years of doing this and well over 1,000 clients, I've only had 2 or 3 people ever ask me to help them learn how to write better, themselves. One of them is a current client who routinely orders supplements to his projects consisting of extensive explanations detailing exactly how I developed the structure and arguments in his projects. Clients at the diametric opposite end of the spectrum are far more common and much closer to the norm. By that I mean clients who don't even bother reading the projects that they order from me, let alone "rewriting" them, and those who pay me a premium to compose the most informal projects, such as one or two-page opinion compositions with overnight (or just several-hour) deadlines or responses to classmates' posts in their class forum discussions. At least 100 clients just in Nursing programs alone have asked me for a long series of 150-word class forum posts and responses to posts. I don't normally take payments for any half-page projects (unless clients are willing to pay the same rate as for at least 1 full page), which means they also typically pay me for 5 or 10 posts in advance to get a better per-post price, because I don't mind charging a half a page at a time off their remaining balance if they want to do it that way. It's entirely their private business how they choose to use my work; but trust me that none of them is "rewriting" any work received from a writer or essay company or ordering any of that work as a means of being "tutored." The same is true of clients who use me regularly for their entire four years of college or however many years of grad school.

If someone has already ignored his obligation to pay for delivered work or has stopped responding to the writer's emails about the debt, there's no such thing as any "mediator" to whom that person will respond, either. Once the project has been delivered, the writer no longer has any leverage whatsoever and the client has zero incentive to participate in any kind of mediation process. Likewise, no freelancer is ever going to "sue" any client over an outstanding debt for several reasons, but most simply, because the cost of travelling to the client's location (which is the only jurisdiction where such a suit could be filed against a customer) is going to be a lot more than the debt for just about any conceivable project. Furthermore, anybody who would renege on a debt in the first place would also purposely make the process as cost-prohibitive as possible for the writer, by simply requesting an adjournment as many times as the court will allow, thereby forcing the writer to make the same trip (and lose valuable work time, as well) at least two or three times chasing that debt in court. That's why every experienced writer knows it's absolutely insane to even consider producing -- much less actually delivering -- any project that hasn't been paid for in full.

I doubt many teachers actually know about this particular forum; but there's no doubt they all know about this industry, which is why it's now standard practice to require students to submit their work to turnitin.

Many of my clients are ESL and it's never an issue. In general, I've learned from experience to ask (all) undergraduates whether they want me to do my best or hold back a little so that their projects aren't "too good" for their level. I do the same thing with my ESL clients. Most of them ask me to limit the complexity and vocabulary level of my writing. However, some of them still demand my absolute best work even though they can barely compose a coherent email in English. That's entirely their prerogative and I don't pry into their decision-making process once I've asked the question and they've responded.

That's strictly your opinion and simply not a view shared by any experienced writer (or essay company) I've ever known. We will never do any work on any project, much less actually deliver any of it, until it's been paid for in full, regardless of how long or short the project is. No exceptions. It's already difficult and time-consuming enough just keeping track of a dozen or two-dozen pre-paid projects pending on my calendar at any given time. Also having to keep track of payments owed for delivered work would only complicate things and waste more of my time unnecessarily, let alone the additional wasted time and hassle (and inevitable losses) associated with having to follow up to remind clients to pay for delivered work or chase down overdue payments. The only workable option for writers who don't want to waste their time tracking down and chasing after payments and (inevitably) also dealing with getting ripped off for some of those payments is simply taking payment for whatever portion of projects new clients are willing to pay for in advance. On satisfactory delivery of the first pre-paid section, the client pays for the next section and receives it by the next deadline. If the client doesn't contact me with enough time to split up the project into sections, full payment in advance is the only option available and that's not my problem. I'm happy to take full payment and deliver the full project by any deadline that I'm capable of meeting. Time management in relation to the project's deadline on the client's end is strictly the client's responsibility, just as completing projects on deadline is strictly my responsibility. If clients don't leave sufficient time to split projects into smaller sections, they deprive themselves of the option of splitting up the project into sections.

I never encountered "editors" at any essay company and writers who are good enough to do this work in the first place really shouldn't need them. How does that even work with short deadlines? Why would a company hire writers whose work requires editing, especially if their writing needs so much work that it represents an ongoing process and long-term "persistence" on the part of "editors" just to bring the work up to industry standards?

There's really nothing a customer can do to guarantee that you'll get the writer you request from an essay company, because if companies require writers to take specific orders, they're opening themselves up to claims by their writers that they're employees with all of the employer-funded benefits and liabilities that come along with that rather than just independent contractors. The only thing customers can really do is specify that if their requested writer is unavailable, they want a refund instead of a different writer. If you specify that in your order, you can dispute the charge if the project is completed by a different writer. That won't get your project done by your requested writer; but at least you'll be entitled to a refund if someone else at the company botches your project. As an essay-company writer, I declined plenty of requests for me, simply because the project wasn't worth my time at the rate the company paid me for it. This happened fairly often after I completed a large rush project for a high price and the same client then started requesting me for tiny projects with long deadlines for which the essay company paid me half the per-page rate of the rush project.


I don't decline small projects like that for my direct clients. As an independent writer, I've gone way out of my way for good clients with emergencies, but even my independent clients still have much more of an obligation (especially, since it's for their degrees and in their personal interest) to contact me ASAP instead of procrastinating and burning off most of their deadlines in between getting the assignment and asking me for my help than any obligation I have to "consistently try to be available." I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. I have a schedule of projects on a filled-up project calendar and the rest of my life already revolves around my project deadlines. What else am I supposed to do? Never leave my apartment or ever do anything but sit by my computers when I'm not working just in case someone decides to contact me requesting a rush project? I already work very hard, but I have the same right as my clients to my own life when I'm not working; so a client's choice to wait until the last minute to contact me is just not my problem, even less so when it was an essay-company project.

I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as "extensive screening" of writers at essay companies. At most, they just review whatever writing samples they provide with their applications and their resumes and (possibly) confirm their degrees. They have absolutely no way of knowing how good any new writer's work is until the writer actually starts fulfilling orders, partly because there's no way to be sure who really wrote the writing samples the writer submitted to the company. Every company hires new writers who end up getting fired almost right away because their work is terrible and/or plagiarized, notwithstanding their resumes and writing samples. Even decent new writers often discover that they're in way over their heads as soon as they start taking more orders than they can fulfill at their best level of writing and end up cutting corners (such as plagiarizing and/or recycling portions of their old work and/or from their previous company orders) out of sheer desperation to make deadlines. Finally, all you have to do is search through threads on this forum and on Essay Chat to see that writers' accounts are also sometimes sold off to total strangers, as well as to "writers" whose applications were already rejected by the companies that issued those accounts to someone else, in which case the company doesn't even know that some of the work submitted under one of their writers' accounts is being written by someone about whom they know absolutely nothing.

To the main question originally asked by the OP about the combination of his draft with the work produced by the essay company: Whether or not it's appropriate to incorporate any of the client's original draft depends on what the client requested and paid for. An experienced writer knows how to make sure that the issues represented by these types of projects are fully discussed in advance so there's no misunderstanding of exactly what the client wants.

If the client provided a draft with comments and revision requests and without any explicit instructions to the contrary, that obviously means substantial portions of the original draft will probably be retained, which usually includes fulfilling all of the revision requests and incorporating much of the existing material, either unchanged or edited appropriately, as necessary for a smooth blending of the exiting draft and the changes and/or additions. In that situation, an independent writer would review the draft and revision requests first and quote a price for the whole project based on the amount of work it seems to require for everything requested. Typically, if that literature review is intended to be a specific length (say 10,000 words), the writer might have the client just pay for a 10,000-word project and agree to issue either a partial refund or future credit (at the client's option) for however much of the original draft ends up in the section, in which case, we'd use a different font color or redlined tracked changes to easily identify new writing and old material. So, if the project is paid as 10,000 words and ends up using 1,000 words from the original draft, the writer would refund or credit back 10% of the payment, etc. Conversely, if it's agreed in advance that the project will be paid as 10,000 words and that approximately 10% of that would be for the necessary editing and/or blending of the draft material, there would be no refund. It all depends on what was discussed in advance.

If you're dealing with an essay company, there usually isn't a quote process before payment because most of them use automatic ordering systems. Customers just select the length of the project and pay for whatever number of pages they order. They might provide instructions about how much of the draft should or shouldn't be used, which isn't a problem as long as they pay for however much work is fairly represented by the requested revisions and however much new writing they want. If they underestimate and order too few pages for the amount of work required, the writer would let customer service know or simply explain it to the customer directly through the messaging system and let the customer decide how to allocate revisions and new writing and/or place a supplemental order for whatever amount of additional paid work is appropriate for the combination of all of the revisions and new writing requested. Likewise, if customers accidentally order and pay for more work than necessary through an automated system, the writer should let customer service and/or the customer know, but that almost never happens, because customers almost always underestimate the amount of work required when projects involve fulfilling substantial revision requests on customers' drafts.

Generally, it would depend substantially on the deadline. A request to cancel a project with a long due date isn't necessarily unreasonable; however, if it's a rush project, the deadline is the much more important determinant of what's reasonable and fair than the amount of time elapsed since payment. Sometimes, if it's a project due in a day or two, a writer might have started working on it immediately, which is often necessary with very short deadlines.

In principle, if the writer has already started working on a project, he's entitled, at a minimum, to payment for however much work he already did before cancellation, not just 10%. If I ran the company, I probably wouldn't allow any project to be cancelled once a writer had started working on it. I'd ask the writer how much was already done before responding to the customer about the cancellation request and (maybe) also ask the writer to send me whatever he already wrote. Then, at most, I'd offer to allow the customer to cancel only the remainder of the project if I allowed any cancellation at all of a project already in progress. Aside from the fact that the writer could have already written much more than 10% of the project, a lot of projects involve substantial research time before anything is actually written, which means even paying the writer for whatever portion has already been written isn't really fair to the writer.

Yesterday, a client contacted me with a question about a project that I delivered about six weeks ago. He said he couldn't connect two footnotes to the articles from which they were cited. I had to explain that while he probably has only one writer, his project is probably 100+ projects in my past and not fresh in my mind and that I don't necessarily save old sources for projects beyond a few weeks. The same question that would have been no problem to answer a reasonably short time after delivery is a huge pain that could require about a paid page worth of my time to figure out a month and a half later. Those two citations weren't mistakes on my end, and it's just not reasonable to expect your writer to find those sources all over again and then go through them and your project again to recall exactly which idea he considered it appropriate to cite six weeks ago.

That's a totally different issue from the thread topic: obviously, no essay company that sells custom-written projects ever wants any of its writers passing off any of his old projects as new custom work, whether he originally wrote them for someone else or for himself as a student. Every custom-written project is supposed to be entirely new work produced specifically for the new order. Both customers and companies employing writers have the right to expect exactly that.

However, on the topic of this thread, what I've never really understood is why anybody would care whether a project is resold 6+ months afterwards the way some companies reserve the right to do. I've never resold a project in my life because there's no market for unoriginal projects and because my clients own the copyright to anything I write for them; but I've never understood why anybody cares as long as it's many months after the original client has already used the project.

Regardless of what the company's TOS say about prohibiting customers from submitting the work for credit, they (obviously) have absolutely no way of monitoring what customers do with their essays unless they publicly post portions of them online for resale or something, which isn't something customers typically do. Even that would most likely never be discovered, because essay companies aren't devoting any of their resources to scour the Internet searching for the essays that they've already sold. Generally, they just include those provisions in their TOS for these two specific reasons: (1) They think it creates some plausible deniability and legal responsibility in states that prohibit academic ghostwriting by statute; and (2) It gives them an excuse not to honor otherwise valid rewrite and/or refund requests, such as where the work they provide fails to meet the original specs but the customer admits to having submitted the work for credit. If you admit to having submitted the work for credit as part of your rewrite/refund request, they can cite your TOS violation and the other language in those TOS pertaining to their right to disclaim any further responsibility for the project if the customer violates their TOS.

How many pages did you order for that $45, because if it was more than 1 or 1.5, that price should have been enough of a warning sign that you probably weren't going to receive anything usable, let alone of high academic quality.

Lately, I've had a string of much more normal exchanges in which they've simply responded to my question by telling me exactly who referred them the first time I asked. Whatever the reason, I hope it continues.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've also had a few clients totally ignore my advice about not trying to mix their writing with mine (especially when they tell me not to hold back and give them my best work) and then send me frantic "emergency" or "URGENT!!" emails begging for my help after suffering the very predictable consequences about which I tried to warn them. It baffles me when they ignore my advice to let me write down to their level after I've seen their writing and tried to share my concerns and the benefit of having done this for a living for almost 20 years.

In my experience, getting the most work from essay companies was mainly a function of staying logged into the system and monitoring the assignment boards constantly in real time. You just have to get a jump on newly-posted projects to grab them before other writers. If you only check the board periodically throughout the day, you'll miss most of the best projects because they get taken off the board by other writers almost as soon as they get posted and before you ever see them. When I wrote mostly for companies, I had a computer next to every place in my apartment where I sit and I used to refresh the screen at least once a minute from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, and on a second screen even while I was writing. Later, at my suggestion, the company added a feature that generated a sound to indicate new orders so that we didn't have to constantly refresh our screens manually. Some companies limit which writers can see certain orders; but otherwise, your principal limitation on getting as many projects as you want is the competition to grab orders before other writers and not necessarily what you need to do to convince the company to give you more work. Obviously, the better your work is the more customers will specifically request you, which usually means you don't have to compete against other writers for those orders.

I love how one of the offers posted on EC says the account is "hardly used" as though it were for tangible consumer goods. I'd imagine that it's "well-used" accounts that would be worth the most, because they would already have some ratings or whatever stats they use to establish credibility.