I play hockey with a guy like that: He never went to college but started a moving company that eventually became pretty big. He also became a licensed pilot, sold the moving company, and now runs a drone aviation company that takes aerial footage for realtors and outside events such as weddings and stuff like that. At the other end of the spectrum, Starbucks has plenty of college graduates and people with advanced Humanities degrees serving coffee these days.

Judging by some of the (totally unnecessary) explanations that new clients sometimes include with their first orders, some of them obviously do feel guilty about it. They typically tell me that they've never done this before but have medical issues or other emergencies that prevent them from writing their own projects. I usually respond that they don't owe me any explanation and that I understand completely because I also got stressed out about writing assignments in college.

According to all of the research, the main correlation between schooling and future economic success over a lifetime relates to the highest level of education achieved, not grades. Generally, college grads have much greater earning potential than high school grads, and people with graduate school degrees have greater earning potential than college grads.

To simplify the answer as much as possible: essay companies struggle to retain their best writers because these are, precisely, the writers with the most options to become independent and to secure other opportunities to do different kinds of writing. There are definitely some good writers who (also) stay with their companies throughout their careers; but it is much more typical for the best writers at the best companies to make the transition to full independence, eventually.

The terms and conditions published on a website are all but meaningless if the company doesn't actually honor them. This forum is full of complaints from customers who got burned precisely because they trusted the terms and conditions and "guarantees" published by the companies with which they chose to do business, partly on the basis of those terms and conditions. Legitimate companies do honor their terms and conditions, but if you end up trusting the wrong company, you'll only find out how meaningless their representations and promises are after they already have your money and you try to get them to honor the terms and conditions upon which you relied in choosing that company in the first place.

Wordsies is absolutely right and the above is an absurd statement. If it were true, just about anybody who speaks English fluently would be able to write for a living. Most people, including many highly successful professionals can barely write above the level of an average college underclassman. I know doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, architects, and all sorts of other very intelligent professionals with "good command" of spoken English who couldn't write a halfway decent college essay of ordinary difficulty in one day. For that matter, I've written for dozens (possibly more than 100) professional educators who needed my services, precisely because writing (well) is a specific talent in its own right that many smart people simply don't have.

If this is what you do fulltime for a living and if your earnings are in the same range as salaried fulltime writers, you're a professional writer.

Being a naturally-good (and versatile) writer is vastly more important than having an advanced degree and one testament to that proposition is simply how many candidates for advanced degrees (including PhD candidates who, by definition, already have earned at least one advanced degree) regularly utilize these types of services. I can also personally attest to the fact that my advanced degree really has practically nothing to do with my ability to do this job extremely well, because I didn't learn how to write in law school. Furthermore, as I've explained before, even as a naturally-good writer, I got just as stressed out at having to write a 10-page essay in college as many of my current clients do by those types of assignments. Back then, if someone had suggested that I'd regularly be writing (good) 10-page essays in a single day someday and (sometimes) two of them in 24 hours, I'd never have believed that. None of my degrees helped me develop as a writer capable of doing what I do for a living today. In my opinion, it's much more a matter of being a naturally-good writer combined with plenty of practice to be able to do it more and more efficiently and across a much broader range of subject areas than having an advanced degree or an advanced degree in any particular academic discipline.

If a client needs to submit both a draft and a final version later, I always suggest to them that they just order the final version from me in time for them to take my final version and create their own "draft" for the first deadline and then hang on to my version for their final deadline. That's a lot cheaper than paying me to write a draft first and then go back to it again later to change that into a final version. I won't refuse to provide a draft first, but that's going to be more expensive, simply because it takes more of my time, mainly because for any project shorter than about 10 pages, it means I'll have to spend a second day writing it instead of simply writing it on whatever day I have it scheduled to be written.

On the topic of outlines from clients, they're only helpful if the client knows what he's doing. Otherwise, they can be a pain because if they're bad, they're still part of the original specs, meaning that I have to contact the client for permission to deviate from it and just do the project the right way by myself. So, if the outline is also supposed to be submitted in advance for approval, the smartest thing to do is simply order that from your writer as part of the project. Generally, you can order whatever you want in that regard. The only thing you can't do is what one of my new clients did about a week ago: namely, she ordered a 5-pg project about 3 weeks earlier and then emailed me about 10 days before it was due asking to have a "look" at the essay and asking for an outline in a couple of days, including a thesis and sentences indicating what each paragraph of the essay was about. Sensing that she was going to be a problem client who was going to be wasting my time with endless emails for the next 10 days, I just banged out the whole project the next day and sent it early to be done with it (and, possibly, her), entirely, ASAP. The last thing I need this time of year is problem clients who don't realize, just from a common-sense perspective, that you can't have a "look" at a project not even due for another 10 days (or an outline for it in a couple of days) because I have a dozen or two dozen other projects to do before I even get to a 5-page freshman English paper due in 10 days and because no "outline" was ever ordered and won't be provided unless the client elects to pay for that.

A few days later, I get an urgent email from her. Instead of paying me for the outline that I offered to do, she decided to ignore my advice against trying to do it herself if I was writing the paper. She submitted an "outline" in which she indicated that her "thesis" was going to be the first sentence of the project I provided, which basically just said that the book was a classic literary work, and she submitted similarly superficial sentences from each paragraph. Naturally, the outline got trashed by the professor and the client demanded a "complete rewrite" of the whole essay (that I delivered more than a week early and about a page longer than ordered) because the professor didn't like "my" outline of the essay that still wasn't even due for more than a week and hadn't even been submitted. I told the client to call me by phone because I just don't have the time right now to explain by email how this whole process does and definitely does NOT work and indicated that I wouldn't be responding to further emails from her unless we had that phone conversation first. I even took a valium right afterwards because I expected her to call and I really didn't want my extreme annoyance to come across on the phone and for her to think that I was being "mean" to her by explaining something that I know should really be quite obvious at the most basic level, even for someone who has never used this kind of service before. She never called and I never heard from her again.

(I'm intentionally leaving out some other details that made this situation even more ridiculous and annoying because of what else I did do to help this client out because I don't want to encourage this behavior on the part of other prospective clients or suggest that I'm ever going to do for anybody else what I actually did do for her.)

I'm going to say this as politely and as non-confrontationally as possible, but you're commenting in a thread whose specific topic is whether or not ESL writers can match EFL writers and just in your very short, seven-sentence post, there are at least a dozen examples of idiomatic and/or word-choice mistakes that make your writing easily-recognizable as ESL. If you're interested in discussing this, I'd be more than happy to list them for you and to demonstrate how an EFL writer might express those exact same ideas differently and correctly. The point is that it's not a matter of "unfairness" for a company or prospective client to treat you differently than they might treat an EFL writer. It's simply a matter of EFL customers preferring their essays to be written in grammatically and idiomatically-correct EFL English rather than in grammatically and idiomatically-incorrect and easily-recognizable ESL English. That's neither personal nor unfair.

If you're going to be dispensing advice here, you really need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, not apples to oranges. Both essay companies and independent writers charge 100% up front, so that's a constant. A client who selects any essay company OR any independent writer online without a reference from a colleague and without the necessary due diligence to try to distinguish legitimate providers from illegitimate providers is equally likely to get ripped off.


The resources on this forum are no less helpful identifying reliable legitimate writers than at helping clients identify legitimate essay companies. Apples to apples.

The reason it's tough to find a good company is simply that this is still a totally unregulated industry conducted almost exclusively online. Even a well-written website with a verifiable address might still provide work of terrible and unusable quality. The only thing new customers can really do is try out the most legitimate-seeming provider with a very short project before ordering a longer project. If you wait to start doing your due diligence until you desperately need a large project and you don't leave yourself enough time to experiment first with a small test order, your likelihood of getting ripped off for a lot of money -- or of wasting a lot of money on a disappointingly-bad product -- increases tremendously.

Furthermore, even otherwise legitimate companies often have some very inexperienced and/or bad writers on their staff. I saw plenty of that as a company writer, on orders whose notes explained that the customer was ordering the same project as one already provided by the same company and demanding that the specific writer who produced the first project NOT be allowed to work on the second order. So, if you do manage to get good work on your first try, consider yourself lucky and always insist on using that same writer on all future orders; otherwise, it's still something of a gamble each and every time you place a new order, even if the company already provided a decent essay the first time.

The companies I've written for just provided the option to contact Customer Service and writers would simply get an email from one of the reps asking for a response to the issue. Most of the time, the matter would be resolved as soon as we explained why the complaint was invalid. That's because if the complaint was valid, writers just made the fix without involving CS at all. So, if CS was already involved, that usually meant the original complaint sent to the writer was invalid. Typical complaints of that nature included after-the-fact requests to add something never included in the original specs, or to rewrite it at a simpler level, or to use a specific resource never mentioned in the original order. In those cases, the exchange between the writer and CS would be something along the lines of "Client is asking for something that wasn't in the original specs" and we'd get a response along the lines of "Thank you. No problem." Then, we'd either never hear anything else about it or we'd get a newly-paid order from the same client with the requested changes as the specs for the new order.


This is precisely why I explain that "samples" are useless when new prospective clients ask for them. I won't refuse to send a sample (on a totally different subject area) if the client just wants to see my writing style; but I tell clients that they're just taking any new writer's word that the writer actually wrote the samples provided. Samples are really only useful in two situations: (1) when you're already sure that you're dealing with a legitimate provider and you just want to see his or her writing style, or (2) when you encounter a sample on a provider's website and even that sample is full of elementary grammar and other writing mistakes, in which case, you can be sure that whatever product you receive from that provider will be even worse.

I wouldn't suggest entertaining even this conversation because it suggests that a discussion of the client's totally subjective opinion about any of that stuff after the fact is appropriate. Instead, I just make sure to ask what quality, language, and analytical level is expected in advance and I provide exactly what they request in all of those respects. Legitimate writers will always fix any outright (objective) mistakes or omissions ASAP and without argument or lengthy discussion; but subjective opinions of this type are a totally different matter. (Of course, none of that necessarily applies if clients are trying to save money by taking the risk of dealing with unproven, inexperienced, or unqualified writers whose work may very well turn out to be fairly considered deficient for myriad reasons.)

Furthermore, while there certainly are some exceptions, remember that in most cases, clients (especially undergraduates) order these projects from us, in the first place, precisely because they can't do them on their own; so they're just not qualified to make subjective criticisms of the work produced by any highly-experienced writer with advanced degrees and thousands of similar projects already under his or her belt. In any case, the appropriate time to discuss expectations about all of that stuff is always during the ordering process and never after the fact.

Every qualified writer who does this (well) for a living knows how to write great projects in many different fields, some of which we never studied in school. You just need to be realistic and honest about your experience while building your competence in different areas. Some of my most regular clients have been nurses and educators even though I'd never written anything about either field when I first started doing this. Within a few years and a few hundred Nursing and Education projects later, I was writing their theses and dissertations with very good results.

Unlike essay service providers, scanning websites' reviews and "reputations" don't mean much, because users wouldn't necessarily have any way of knowing what the system actually does with those files after they're scanned. If the scanners are stealing the work and publishing it, they probably wait a few weeks (or months) and they don't publish them on websites that are easily identifiable as being connected to the scanning site.

Based on my PayPal breakdown for the 1st quarter of 2019, Australia was my 4th-largest source of revenue, behind the US, UK, and Ireland, in that order. For all of 2018, Australia was also #4, behind the US, UK, and Canada.

Meanwhile, after May 1st, PayPal will no longer be refunding their fees on refunded payments.

I never encountered a company that forged the ID of a requested writer, but I used to get requests for short projects with long deadlines (in which I couldn't possibly have had less interest) all the time. Usually, it was from clients for whom I'd previously written a much longer rush project. It's not that I didn't sympathize with their desire to stick with the same writer whose work they liked, but I write to make the best possible living from the whatever time I choose to spend working and not as some kind of charitable enterprise, and I couldn't afford to spend any time writing projects for $10/page, which was the payout for projects with long deadlines. I once got a message from the company telling me not to take projects unless I was prepared to take follow-ups for those projects and I responded that: (A) there's no way to know which projects might require "follow-ups" and (B) I couldn't find that clause anywhere in the contract I'd signed with them, but that we could possibly discuss all that when we get around to discussing the health insurance plan that the company was prepared to offer me and the W-2 that they'd be providing instead of my 1099. The issue never came up again.

Agreed. The main advantages of this work include not having to commute to an office or work directly with other people and being able to do your work (and sleep) whenever you want to (and without alarm clocks in your life), whether that means working all night and sleeping well into the afternoon or getting up early and using the rest of your day however you want to after completing your projects. The disadvantages include working a LOT more than 40 hours in some weeks and (often) having to change (or cancel) your non-work plans to squeeze in rush projects that are worth it, as well as having to be prepared to work at just about any time of day or night 7 days a week if you want to earn as much as possible. It's definitely not suited to someone who prefers a regular schedule: sometimes, I'll work all night and go to sleep at 9:00 AM; other times, I might get up around 5:00 AM for hockey, start working around Noon, and go to bed around 8:00 PM. Sometimes, I'm up 24 straight hours or more, followed by only 5 or 6 hours of sleep, after which I'll write a project and go right back to bed for another 8 hours to catch up on sleep. You really have to be willing to adapt your schedule to fit your deadlines and whatever other interests or obligations you have in your life. If you have kids or another job or you can't sleep during the day, it's almost impossible to do this for a living, except maybe as a part-time gig for some extra income on the side.

That is not consistent with my experience as a company writer. They did start off limiting how many projects I could take, but that limit only applied to how many orders I could accept per day; and there was never any limit on how many pending projects I could have on my account at the same time. In fact, they encouraged us all to take as much work as possible, such as by awarding a TV or an iPad for the most pages written in a month. Other times, they'd reach out directly to a few of us to ask whether we could take on particularly difficult projects and/or projects for "VIP" customers, such as the family members of staff, etc. Usually, these special requests came in during the highest points of busiest seasons when they could see that we already had 15 or 20 pending deadlines on our accounts for that week and if we responded that we were already too booked up, they would usually increase the bonus they were offering until one of us accepted the order.

I'm sorry, but you really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Anybody capable of writing at a high level can easily simplify his language to write at a much lower level. It's neither difficult nor anything close to a "struggle" and it doesn't require "learning" anything; it just takes us longer to write in a different tone than in one's natural tone and it can be tedious. More importantly, when a higher-level writer chooses to write at a simpler level, any mistakes are intentional and very minor, whereas the mistakes of an ESL writer who doesn't write that well in English are foundational mistakes that substantially compromise the value of the entire work.

Your best bet is probably to find a US or UK writer who has a lot of experience writing Australian projects.

On what basis do you draw this conclusion?

Nobody criticizes ESL writers who admit to being ESL writers; the criticism is reserved for those who try to conceal that fact, arguing that it "doesn't matter" and that customers don't have a legitimate right to know in advance. Your writing isn't bad, but there are plenty of mistakes in most of your posts, most of which relate to your being ESL. For example, just in this one post:


We would say throwing at, never throwing "on," unless you're talking about water or a blanket, and the intention is to benefit the person..


We don't start sentences with although followed by a comma; we say however or nevertheless.


This may not necessarily relate to ESL, but what you mean here is that the person could use more practice. You'd never say that someone isn't good at something "because of a lot of practice."


This is not a construction that NES would use for at least 2 reasons.


The word you want here is considering, or contemplating, not "mentioning"; and if the point is that someone shouldn't be saying that he is an academic writer, the phrase you want is either claiming, or representing himself, or holding himself out as, or calling himself. One of the hallmarks of (even good) ESL writing is that you tend to latch onto a single word or phrase (such as mention) and then overuse it in places where it's understandable as a very loose synonym, but definitely not the right word for what you mean. "Thus" and "thusly" are also frequently misused and overused in this way by even pretty good ESL writers.

Your English writing is good, but it definitely illustrates why even pretty good ESL writing is almost always still recognizable as ESL writing. Your other posts on this forum contain some much less subtle and much worse mistakes than these, but I'm not in the habit of criticizing other people's English grammar unless the topic they're commenting on actually is grammar or unless they are ESL and arguing that there's no reason anybody should care about whether his writer is ESL or NES. I can point some of them out if you're interested in learning, but I'm not going to do it just to embarrass you maliciously.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I believe the only issue was PayPal prohibiting payments for any and all academic essay writing, not prohibiting payments to some essay companies but not others. My only point was that PayPal has the prerogative to prohibit payments for any type of product, including academic essays, whether or not you or I agree with or like that policy. They would not, as you suggested earlier, have to know or prove which specific projects constitute ghostwriting and which specific projects constitute some other kind of writing. They could simply choose to prohibit all "writing for hire" if they want to, as well as payments to any company that offers academic essays, regardless of what other kinds of writing projects that company also provides.

Nobody is talking about prohibiting payments to some essay companies but not others. I merely qualified my earlier point so that nobody would assume that I was saying there's no limit at all to their freedom to prohibit payments, such as if they were to discriminate against a constitutionally-protected class. It should be more than obvious that I wasn't suggesting that they could target some companies while accepting payments from other companies engaged in the same kind of work.

I wasn't expressing any opinion at all about what the editor said or about what I think PayPal should or shouldn't do. Obviously, it would be very bad for me if they decided to prohibit payments for essay writing, just as it would be very bad for your essay company. I was simply explaining that, as a non-governmental entity, PayPal cannot be "sued" for its decision to prohibit whatever types of products it chooses to prohibit, as long as they don't discriminate against a constitutionally-protected class, such as by prohibiting books about some religions or races but not others. However, if they choose to prohibit payments for all books or for all virtual services, that's entirely their prerogative.

digitaltrends.com/web/guns-drugs-and-timeshares-14-things-paypal-wont-let-you-buy/

As a non-governmental entity, they could freely ban any business that offers academic ghostwriting (or that seems to offer academic ghostwriting, notwithstanding "TOS" provisions that are obviously just intended to create plausible deniability).


No. They wouldn't have to do anything but ban any entity that offers any kind of academic ghostwriting, regardless of what other services they may also provide. Paypal already bans transactions to pay for various types of legal products that they wouldn't be able to ban if they had to comply with the same standards as government entities, such as "collectable" Nazi paraphernalia and both real and replica firearms that are perfectly legal in many states, and without any obligation to permit such transactions in states where firearm ownership may be perfectly legal.

I wouldn't say that I "love" writing; for me, writing for a living is just a matter of swimming with the current instead of against it, by doing what I happen to do better than anything else, naturally.

@jerng
That would a response to a question about why someone likes working as a freelancer (more generally), not why someone likes working for a specific company or through a specific platform.

You should probably think of it the same way you'd think of other products and service in other industries: The difference between the quality of the work you're likely to get from higher-priced services and what you're likely to get from lower-priced services is probably worth the price difference. As a consumer, I'd much rather pay 50% more for a really great job than 50% less for something that might barely be usable (speaking generally, and not specifically about any particular essay provider). I get emails from people all the time who already paid a lot of money for an entire project that turned out to be a total waste who then end up paying me more than they paid a cheaper provider for me to do it entirely from scratch. In general, you should always order a very short part of any large project instead of ever paying anybody you haven't used before for an entire 12,000-word project.

Just curious: how'd you narrow it down to those two companies?

Yes. If you're a good writer, it's just a matter of learning how to do it more efficiently and building a clientele gradually but steadily.

It would probably be best to try to contact the student first using the direct email mentioned by the OP, just in case the student was also an innocent victim of a third-party scammer, as I mentioned earlier.

Exactly.

@Kind_Writer
You don't even seem to be reading responses because you're just looking to instigate an argument and manufacturing ridiculous excuses to refer to someone you know nothing about as being "not too honest."


How do I define who is a legitimate service provider? By the fact, for one example, that it's someone whose requests I used to see regularly when we wrote for the same essay company and whose contributions to this forum I've read for years and whose work and comments from previous clients I've seen.


Obviously a writer who accepts a project outside of his abilities is dishonest. Did you not read or understand my prior post? I specifically said that "anybody to whom I'd ever refer any work is someone who would be equally honest about his confidence level with the project" and that obviously includes being honest about not being able to take a project outside his areas.

If you actually believe that posting a project publicly for random writers is safer than a referral from a writer someone already trusts and that makes sense to you, that's your business. I make no money from projects referred to others and have no reason for doing it other than to help a client out. It's strictly a courtesy for the client's benefit, not mine. It would be easier for me to just say "Sorry, I can't do it and can't help you find another writer."


Trust me that nobody here is asking you anything. FYI, I don't have any "buddies" who write for a living. Any other writer I know to be legit is someone I know only as a writer, either from when we were writing for the same company or from this forum.

If I know I cannot take an order with confidence, I tell the client that. If I refer the client to someone else, it's at the client's request and with the obvious understanding that the only thing I can possibly vouch for is that the other writer (or company) is a legitimate service provider and not some scammer.


I have no way of knowing how well someone else is going to do on a project that I can't do and its neither my business nor my responsibility. I provide the referral strictly as a courtesy to help the client get the project done; the rest is between that client and that writer. Anybody to whom I'd ever refer any work is someone who would be equally honest about his confidence level with the project.

@Kind_Writer
Virtually everything in your post is incorrect, and I'm not saying this even slightly because I expect to be acknowledged as an "elder" or have my ego "stroked" or to "bully" you. Ironically, your post actually does the one thing that really annoys the legit writers who have been members of this forum for many years, and it's not really any different from what you'd find at just about any online forum community: namely, join a forum and immediately start dispensing your "advice," all of which happens to be either somewhat wrong or totally wrong and indicates to us that you don't have any experience in this field.


You can't really "steal" anybody else's regular clients, simply because once clients find a good writer, they don't usually continue looking for writers on the forum. Most of them come here to find a writer for the first time or to find a better writer after the first service provider they tried failed to provide good work. Many of them never even bother registering or posting after registering; they just read posts and ads and contact writers.


This might have been true about one person who used to post here a lot, but it's not the case with the rest of us. If you just contribute to forum discussions in a meaningful way without dispensing bad advice, especially if you're as new to this industry as you are to the forum, nobody will have any problem with you. Don't try to make a big splash by posting 10 or 15 times in an transparently obvious attempt to reach the PM threshold and don't start bumping decade-old threads in that process and responding to OPs whose question or comment is a decade old as though anybody's been waiting around for your response since 2008.


If an established writer has any overflow, the last thing any of us would do would be to trust someone we don't know with a project. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a fledgling writer, you don't have any projects to "share" with any other writer.


Nobody is interested in helping you get started because we're direct competitors for the same clients. However, most of us will interact with you very civilly and even provide advice about tangential matters that help you at no direct expense to us (as I just did in another thread in response to a new writer who asked about how to handle "vanishing" clients who owe money for delivered projects). Most of us will not help you learn how to find clients here, because we're direct competitors for their business; but that doesn't mean we'll be rude to you or consider you to be an enemy.

If you're a new writer who wants to be welcomed by veteran writers here, don't pretend that you have much more experience in this field than you really do; and ask questions instead of presuming to offer "advice" that you're not qualified to provide and that makes it very obvious to those of us who are that you really have no idea what you're talking about and that you're trying to pretend to be more experienced than you really are. That's not even a unique feature to this industry or this forum, either: go to practically any online forum, and whether it's about health, or law, or medicine, or physical fitness, or classic cars, or sports, or aviation, you'll find the exact same interpersonal dynamics between the most experienced members of those forums and its newest members. Ask questions and you'll almost always get good answers from the veterans; but come in dispensing your advice (especially bad advice that highlights your total lack of any experience in the field), and you'll get a very different kind of welcome from the veterans of any online forum community, including this one.

I'd very strongly disagree with that. If they didn't know these kinds of services existed, they wouldn't require students to submit their work to turnitin. That practice evolved precisely because essay companies used to do a ton of business reselling pre-written essays and it basically created the market for original custom essays. Before the Internet age, pre-written essays were mostly retyped from the hardcopy essay collections maintained by fraternities, for which a service such as turnitin would have been useless. In my view, the popularity of turnitin among professors suggests very strongly that they are very aware that this industry exists. It's not effective against custom-written original essays, but they know that it is still extremely effective against the product that dominated this industry until roughly 2007 and, in their minds, at least it reduces cheating because it forces their students to go with a much more expensive option.


What percentage of your customers do you think really use your work only as model for their own work rather than submitting it for a grade?

You're responding to someone who can barely compose even a single sentence in grammatically-correct English, who spent years here viciously attacking and lying about legitimate writers as his only competition "strategy" and who essentially admits to running a scam company in his post. Obviously, his premise is ridiculous: scam companies take money and, in return, provide either nothing at all or nothing remotely usable because it's just a bunch of copied/pasted gibberish from "writers" who don't write English any better than he does.

Obviously, legit companies don't share writer pools (or anything else) with their scam counterparts. However, some of the largest legit companies do use a single writer pool for a dozen or more companies or "affiliates" that don't openly disclose the fact that all those companies are really just a single parent company. As a writer for one of them, I routinely saw projects that had been ordered from different companies because customers sometimes included their order page along with their project materials. Sometimes, customers placed orders that actually said things along the lines of "I hope you guys are better than _______ company, because I already ordered this project from ______ and it was horrible." Those customers obviously had no clue that their new order simply got posted on the exact same assignment board for all of the exact same writers and that the only difference was the customer-facing website and the transaction recipient.