Regardless of where students might place ads, they're going to get inundated with responses from writers, some of whom are legit and very good at what they do and some of whom are total frauds (at worst) and just not very experienced or good (at best). You're still going to have to go through the process of vetting any prospective writer independently. Since you can't avoid that step, you might as well skip the added step of posting an ad first. This forum provides a wealth of information about many writers, sometimes going back more than a decade, where you can judge for yourself how well a writer expresses himself in writing and what prior clients and legitimate competitors have said about them. Starting off with the featured/recommended/reviewed writers here would be a good first step, followed by using the search function here to research the history of any writer. (As always, change the default "Titles" to "Messages" so your search returns aren't limited to threads with the writer's S/N in the thread title.)

If you pay by credit card, there's really no way around divulging your full name. What you should be most wary of are sites that require (or even ask without necessarily requiring) you to divulge your academic institution.

Obviously, neither of them is acceptable. However, you're probably much better off receiving nothing for at least two reasons:

1. If you paid by PayPal or some similar method, your chances of getting a refund are much better if you received nothing. If they send you even a horribly-written project that's totally unusable to you, third-party intermediaries like PayPal will often tell you that they don't "get involved" in "evaluating the quality" of a written project. The best case in that scenario would be outright plagiarism that you could prove to the intermediary by showing them the actual source of whatever was plagiarized. If the problem is the quality of the work, you have a very steep uphill battle to convince PayPal that you're entitled to a refund, even though you are by any reasonable objective standard.

2. The consequences of missing your deadline could be a very bad grade for the course. However, the worst-case scenario (such as if you don't realize the work was plagiarized and you rely on it for your submission), the consequences could be much worse, including formal university charges for academic dishonesty.

Most projects shorter than 10 pages can be (and very often are) completed at a very high level in a single sitting by a good, experienced writer. Generally, it's only students and very inexperienced writers who aren't yet very good at what they do who actually need to produce multiple "drafts" over several days on a typical project. As company writers, we would often take projects not due for a week and just write them the day before they were due or even earlier on the same day they were due. Further, regardless of when we write projects, those of us who have written thousands of them usually don't need to write multiple "drafts" of typical projects: we just write them in one sitting, let them sit for a while, and then do a "cold" proofread to catch any mistakes.

When your writers take projects today that aren't due for 10 days, how do you send draft copies to clients anytime before the writer chooses to sit down write the project on the 9th day if that's where the writer chose to put it on his work calendar?

If a customer asks for a draft on Day 2 or Day 7 for a project due in 10 days, what do you do when the writer responds (perfectly appropriately) that the project isn't due for another several days and simply reassures the customer (and/or you) that after writing thousands of similar projects, he really doesn't need to write "drafts" the way students and relatively inexperienced writers do?

In the event one of your writers does provide an interim draft that (so far) is perfectly consistent with the original project specs, what do you do when the customer responds that he'd like the project to have a different focus than (let's say) the first half that's already been completed as per spec or (let's say) wants to "reduce" one of the already-completed sections and use more space for a yet-to-be-written section? How do you handle that situation in a manner that satisfies the customer without being unfair to the writer whose draft is already perfectly consistent with the original specs?

This is only true if the freelancer involved is just starting out in this business and doesn't already have an excellent reputation developed over many years. Those of us who have been the best writers at the best essay companies don't charge less than the companies charged for our work. The only real difference is that our clients have direct access to us. Frankly, even though we were conscientious as company writers, we're even more conscientious with our private clients, precisely because it's our own reputation on the line rather than that of the company. For example, if we ever encounter some emergency that makes it impossible to meet two deadlines, on a company project and on a private project, it's always the private project that will be completed first.


Those of us who spent years as the best writers at the best essay companies are not even slightly less reliable as freelancers than we were as company writers; if anything, we're more reliable as freelancers, as explained above. If I get sick, I have several excellent writers who are available to back me up in an emergency, just as I'm available to back them up in similar circumstances. Generally, as a company writer, if I notified the company that I was sick or had some emergency that interfered with my ability to complete a company order, the company would simply take that order off of my account and put it right back on the assignment board where it could be taken by any writer who wanted it, including writers whose work was nowhere even close to being as good as mine. If they offered it directly to one of their other top writers, chances are very good that those were some of the exact same writers who have been my backup as a freelancer for many years. We protected one another's requests on the company board from being taken by other writers after they went public (as explained in detail in other threads) and now we back one another up as freelancers.

If I ever lost Internet access, the company would have had no way of knowing that until I got back online and notified them. Generally, unless I notified them directly, the company had no idea there was a problem unless a client contacted them after the due date to ask about the project. Ordinarily, if a project was late, we writers just received an automatic notice from the system and customer service only found out there was a problem if the client or the writer contacted them about it directly.


That's certainly true if you're talking about someone without a very long reputation going back over a decade on a public forum such as this one and who has been operating under the same ID and email for even longer than that. After building up a reputation over many years under our forum ID and email, we can't just change emails for many of the same reasons an established company can't just change company names.

What are "successive" orders? Every project that a writer takes is "successive" in relation to his previous orders. How could you possibly ever even know when your writers are actually writing their projects in relation to their due dates unless all of them are rush projects due the same day they're ordered or the next day?

As anybody who has ever written for or run an essay company knows, only a small fraction of projects are due the same day that they're ordered (or even the next day). The vast majority of the projects that essay companies list for their writers have due dates of at least several days; many times, they're not due for a week or more. When I was still primarily writing for essay companies, I had as many as 20 projects on my calendar at a time and they were usually spread out over at least the whole next week; and I was a writer who took relatively few orders that had long deadlines, notwithstanding company rules against taking only (or "mostly") rush projects that was never enforced on me (or even mentioned). An essay company only knows when writers take orders and when they upload them to the system after completion. They had no idea, or even any way that they could possibly have known, what days in between those two dates I may have chosen to rest or spend my time doing something else, including writing for my own clients or for clients of other companies for which their writers may work.

The only metrics that essay companies use to monitor or control their writers' work are the quality of their projects, how often they miss deadlines, how many justified rewrite requests they get, and how often they're requested (or complained about) by customers. I wrote for the company widely acknowledged to be the biggest and best in the United States and probably also the most profitable. They relied disproportionately heavily on their four or five best and highest-volume writers (including me) than on their many other writers, and we sometimes averaged several projects daily, and for many months at a time. They even encouraged us to work as much as possible, sometimes by awarding a television to the writer who wrote the most in a given month; and when they did that, they counted total pages written, not projects. When I started with them, there was a limit (only) on how many projects I could take per day, not on how many projects I could put on my calendar; and all I ever had to do to raise that limit was ask. I haven't written anything for them since 2013, but my writer's account is still active and the current limit on my account is 15 projects taken off the assignment board per day.

The idea that the company would ever have "instructed" us to take days off is plainly ludicrous, aside from the fact that they had no way of knowing what days we wrote or, consequently, any way of enforcing that. If anything, we high-volume producers were the writers they approached directly with requests to handle emergency and/or extreme-rush projects and/or projects for friends and family members of the company owners and/or reps even when our calendars were already overflowing. If we ever replied that we were already too booked up to take on another project, their response would typically be to offer us more money for those projects, not to "instruct" or "order" us to take a rest day. That simply does not happen, mainly for the reason explained in my first paragraph above: namely, because the company can't possibly even know what days we're actually working or not working in the first place, and would have no sensible way of enforcing any such rule.

I'll add another: turning in a model essay for credit and then dealing with accusations of cheating because the most recent essay a student turned in obviously couldn't possibly have been written by the same person who wrote the previous essays submitted by that student to the same professor. If a customer chooses to submit a model essay for academic credit, that's totally out of our control; but to submit it to a professor who has already read other essays written by the student is just dopey unless the student happens to be a great writer. One such client recently contacted me with a frantic request for help in an email with "EMERGENCY" in the subject field. He'd asked me to do my "best" and shoot for an A, which is exactly what I did. Apparently, he submitted it for credit and it was plainly obvious to his professor that he couldn't have written it, based on his previous projects in the same class. What clients choose to do with my projects after they receive them from me is entirely their business, but submitting work written by a professional writer to the same professor who knows you as a C-level writer isn't a smart thing to do. If you do something that silly, there's really nothing we can do to help you after the fact. At least tell your writer to give you something more realistic for your writing ability if that's how you plan to use the product. A good writer can tone down his writing to almost any level if that's what you want.

Understood. I was just sharing my experience, not disagreeing with anything you said.

For most of the decade that I was primarily an essay-company writer, I worked for only one company. Technically, I wrote for dozens of "companies," because they run dozens of essay companies under totally different names (and own hundreds). However, in any practical sense, that's immaterial to writers, simply because we had a single assignment board and customer-service team that represented and managed all of the orders from those many different companies, and we received only a single paycheck from the parent company.

That's quite a high level of personal nastiness in response to one person who did absolutely nothing but express an impersonal, totally objective disagreement, on principle, with something you said you do with your writers and in response to another person who simply said that he wouldn't work for a company that subscribed to that policy. Nobody "attacked" you personally or disparaged your business. For the record, on the topic of our being "failures" for actually producing the kind of work for which you only relatively recently began increasingly admitting to being a broker or middleman, I'd like to note that you've spent so much time pounding away at the keyboard (mostly reviving irrelevant and obsolete ancient threads to boost your post count and establish credibility here), to have bombarded this forum with 100 more posts than one of us who has been here for 5.5 years and with more than one-quarter as many posts in merely 8 months as I have contributed here in 10.5 years.. We each post maybe once or twice a day and we skip many days, whereas you're here pounding away as often as 10 or 20 times daily. I'm not criticizing you for it, just pointing out that glaring contradiction.


That would be fine if you're an employer.


If they're freelancers, they're not your employees and you don't get to exercise the degree of control that you're allowed to exercise over employees.


There is no such thing, at least as it relates to the issue of whether you're liable for health insurance and unemployment insurance. Technically, either you contract with independent subcontractors (freelancers) subject to the laws that apply to that relationship or you "employ" employees, in which case you're subject to a lot more laws and liabilities than what kinds of computers anybody uses. I've seen exactly this happen to someone who operated for years with independent contractors installing high speed cable for him. Eventually, he got sued by and had to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to them because a few of them who got fired or hurt got an employment lawyer together and established in court that the totality of the control he had over them (just for making their schedules and keeping track of their jobs, essentially) made him an employer who owed some of them retroactive overtime and others unemployment and health insurance. Immediately after that case, NYS came after him for unpaid health insurance on all of his current employees and various other claims to money he never paid because he thought he was operating as a contractor with independent subcontractors for many years. The court ruled that he was an employer based on a degree of control that was roughly comparable to what you've described. (And yes, they'd all signed paperwork identifying them strictly as independent subcontractors and, specifically, not as employees.) He still lost the case.

When you exercise that level of control over how they do their work and over deadlines on pending projects, you might find yourself having to pay unemployment to writers you fire (depending on why and when they got fired) and health insurance to all of your other writers. If they're freelancers, they can pick and choose (only) whatever projects they want, and you don't have any right to require them to complete projects on which you change the deadline after they accept them or to require them to own laptops. That's not an attack or an accusation; it's a very brief outline of the distinction between freelance independent contractors and employees. If you consider them employees, you can impose whatever requirements you want on both issues; you just can't have it both ways. If they're freelancers, you can only require that their computers meet certain specs that relate to ensuring they can produce the full range of work they do for you. Backup capabilities and procedures are also reasonable for your freelancers; but not the rest of it.


You, who just announced that you're not a freelancer and simultaneously belittled us for only being freelance writers are explaining what freelancing means to those two freelancers, one of whom is widely known here (and elsewhere) as "FreelanceWriter" and both of whom have explained that we do it precisely because of the lifestyle it allows. Your apparent focus on the distinction between "office" and "home" is largely irrelevant in the legal analysis of whether your writers are employees or independent contractors.


That just isn't either of our styles. If it were, we'd have "come after" one another in the last 5 years instead of sometimes referring clients to one another when that seems like a good idea for the client and for us. Please. We were here for 10 years and 5 years, respectively, before you ever showed up to start bombarding the forum with 10 or 15 or 20 posts nearly every day. I accumulated ~1600 posts in 10.5 years whereas you've furiously banged out ~1450 in just 8 months.


Excuse me. This is a forum for industry-related conversations. The thread topic was originally about the computer choices of freelancers. You decided to change that topic (according to your apparent standards and definitions about forum etiquette) to why an essay company requires laptops of its writers. Nobody objected to that, much less attacked or insulted you about it; however, your cramming in your strict policies for your writers in this thread is what changed it's direction. It wasn't our honest responses directly to those points you introduced, either; and none of it was phrased accusatorily, much less nastily. On the issue of being "obvious," most experienced users here recognize a very high percentage of your posts (regardless of thread topic) manage to mention something about how you deal with your writers and your clients. If we were looking to make an enemy of you, we wouldn't have avoided pointing that out whenever you do it (or avoided pointing out other obvious contradictions in some the things you've said about yourself in the last 8 months that haven't gone unnoticed), because with the exception of one recent thread for which you actually still owe both of us an apology, you don't ordinarily picks fights with us, either. And nobody picked a fight with you here: You chimed into the laptop thread with a detailed outline of how strictly you control your supposedly "freelance" writers; and two freelance writers who became freelance writers largely because we're not willing to allow anybody to exert that degree of control over how (or when or on what) we work provided our view of your policies. That's a conversation, and one that's precisely on a point raised in an immediately prior post, not "changing" the topic one iota. Your nasty insults in response to that were totally out of line.


Excuse me. You volunteered two of your very strict requirements here in a thread whose topic was about which type of computer is more beneficial to independent writers, not which type is more beneficial to people who hire independent writers. Two independent writers who have also written extensively for companies in the past responded with mature, appropriate, and totally objective bases for disagreeing with your policies from the perspective of independent writers. That's not "sticking your nose in" anything; it's contributing in a meaningful adult way to a conversation.

An essay company doesn't have any more right to demand that its independent contractors "complete a job ahead of schedule" than its writers have a right to demand extra time to complete a project with a set deadline. At most, you could ask the writer whether he or she still wants a project whose deadline a client has changed since the writer agreed to take the order. Independent writers accept company projects based on the information and deadlines presented to them at the time they accept those projects. If any of that changes, they have a right to ask for extra payment from the company or to give the project back to the company to find a different writer. Frankly, whether or not a writer uses a laptop or where and when he does his writing is none of a company's business, because the writer's only obligation to the company is to complete projects according to their specs and general company standards and policies, and by their agreed deadlines.

They also skew customers' expectations about reasonable pricing, because they can make a very nice profit even at ridiculously low prices, since they don't actually have to worry about producing the work for which they're paid. Their "work" on projects is over once they collect the payments.

"You take a $200 case of booze and sell it for $100. It doesn't matter; it's all profit."
-Henry Hill (Goodfellas)

Apparently, they're actually still fooling quite a lot of customers, especially those who are new to this industry, based on how often my new clients report first having been ripped off by one (or more than one) of them before finding me. Typically, they don't seem to realize that this industry is dominated by the lowest-quality providers and outright scams until after their first experience with one or two of them. Only then do they start searching the term "scam" and eventually stumble onto this forum. Some of those companies do a fairly good job of presenting themselves as legitimate on their websites, especially to consumers who have grown up routinely ordering goods and services online. The others have such atrociously-written web copy that it's amazing to me that there are American or British students who don't realize there's just no way those companies could possibly provide good work. Other times (approximately once a month), I get emails from students who asked me for a quote a few weeks earlier but then decided to try one of these types of companies, attracted by what seemed like a bargain price. They end up paying me at least as much as my original quote that they previously declined in addition to whatever they already wasted trying to save money with those kinds of companies.

This apparently occurred in 2009, when plagiarism scanning was still relatively new rather than standard at most academic institutions, and it demonstrates why there's now such a good market for custom-written academic essays but no longer any market for pre-written essays. The OP didn't say how he determined that the project in question was purchased instead of just having been copied and pasted from open-source material found by the student, herself. Obviously, his advice to students is limited in applicability to those who (foolishly) try to submit a purchased essay to professors already familiar with their sub-par writing and/or English-language skills. Notwithstanding the ethical issues, there's no comparable risk to students whose professors aren't already familiar with their writing style, as long as they find a service provider with a very long reputation for providing only original custom work.

Those kinds of TOS terms are what's known as creating "plausible deniability" so that a company that knows, full well, that it's in the business of academic ghostwriting and that all (or nearly all) of its clients do submit their product for academic credit can argue that only the client violated any applicable laws about academic ghostwriting. Meanwhile, (of course) they know that nobody would ever pay them hard-earned money for an essay whose only permitted use is reading it or using it to "study."


Negative. Those TOS very clearly say that the customer may not "copy, modify, publish, transmit, transfer or sell, reproduce, create derivative works..." If a client is going to violate the company's TOS, anyway, he might as well ignore it completely and use the product however he chooses. More generally, "rewriting" and "paraphrasing" ideas (from any source) without proper attribution is rank plagiarism, contrary to your advice about that in many threads. If the idea came from another person, you can't "rewrite" or "paraphrase" your way out of plagiarism if you don't acknowledge where the idea came from by citing the original source. The only difference that rewriting or paraphrasing make is that they only require a citation, whereas verbatim quotes require presentation as quotes within quotation marks and formatted according to whatever other specifications are required by the citation style.

Do you want to maybe clarify and qualify that insulting statement so that you don't unintentionally (or intentionally) disparage those of us reviewed/recommended writers who started building our good reputations on this forum almost a decade before you ever showed up here to start reviving ancient threads and dispensing your advice? Every legitimate freelance writer I have ever known charges full payment up front, without exception. As you already know, I'm one of the most trusted and respected writers on this forum, which means I really don't appreciate having you imply otherwise, even indirectly, such as by suggesting that writers who require payment in advance shouldn't be trusted.


FYI, this means you're also "a writer who demands the full payment upfront," contrary to everything else in your post. No writer I know refuses to take partial payment for delivery of only whatever portion of a project a client wishes to pay for in advance. I don't require anybody to pay for an entire large project in advance. If a new client wants to play it safe by ordering and paying for only "30%" of a large project, that's fine; but I don't put anything on my calendar, much less start working on it, until whatever portion of a project the client chooses to order is paid for.

What you need to understand is that this is a totally unregulated industry without any oversight or performance or quality standards of any kind. That means the only real value of business permits is that they make it a bit harder to dissolve and create scam businesses one after the other.

But it doesn't really make it prohibitively difficult, as it's done quite routinely by shady landscapers, home-improvement contractors, and other types of businesses where scammers and outright criminal enterprises have proliferated. In this business, even when our permits or business licenses have a long history, that's got absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work provided. There are licensed and registered essay services that have (apparently) been quite profitable in this industry despite disappointing many (or even most) of their clients for years. Their business model is the complete opposite of independent writers like me, because most of their income is from a steady supply of disappointed first-time/last-time clients. Legit freelance writers hope that every new client will become a regular client and, in the best scenarios, will end up using us exclusively for years, all based on being thrilled with the first piece of our work. The problem is that if someone just provides you with a poor essay on the right topic and of the right length, and referenced in the right style, there's no such thing as any kind of "license or registration" that's going to help you recover payment or compel an unpaid revision. In fact, you're much better off being scammed outright and not receiving any essay, because that gives you some potential avenues of recovery. Finally, before you rely on the BBB rating in that regard, that's no guarantee either, simply because they're not what you think they might be: they just sell award accreditation and high ratings to businesses that want to pay them for it and they withhold them for long-established non-paying totally legit businesses. The actual reports on the BBB sites aren't nearly as helpful as Yelp reviews because no BBB complaints are ever posted unless and until they've been formally adjudicated in court or by an applicable agency and produce a negative outcome such as a fine or a court order. So, the BBB will not give you any hint of how many people have actually complained about a BBB business and it can still keep its AAA rating despite numerus (or even perpetual) complaints.

It's all explained and fully referenced right in this recent thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/safeguard-deceptive-writing-services-common-6339/

Models 1 & 2 aren't applicable at all to freelance writers. Model 4 is impractical for anybody other than those desperate for their first clients to try to launch their careers as independent writers. Nobody who does this fulltime could possibly afford to write a page for every prospective client. Model 3 is patently ridiculous for any online service. I can't think of any online business that delivers its goods or performs its services first and accepts payment afterwards, let alone also being subject to the customer's subjective approval after delivery or performance.

My website pings "Toronto" because that's apparently where my webhost is. My clients (and anybody else who knows my name) can easily confirm that I'm in NYC.

The otherwise-inexplicable Travolta reference above was from the 1985 movie Perfect in which he played a journalist. (Note to self: Don't post on Ambien.) All I knew was that if there was a way to earn a living by sitting on my couch writing on a computer, that's what I wanted to do.

It's a lot simpler than that. The freedom to work on your own schedule without having to worry about alarm clocks or regular office hours and/or any commute back and forth to work are balanced out by the fact that we work most days of our lives, and our non-work schedules and freedom to pursue our other interests necessarily revolve around our project schedules and that things can get very busy and hectic during the busiest seasons. That some more traditional industries require much heavier work patterns during some parts of the year is not that unusual: and that's essentially the same situation faced any anybody who's primary limit on earning are production factors that correspond to various calendars. Lawyers on trial are overworked and sleep deprived for many weeks and CPAs are swamped with private clients every winter.

I can't speak for others, but I'd suggest that this isn't a good job for anybody who doesn't already lean toward being a hermit; because if that's not normally your style, you will find this work even more stressful. I've always had nocturnal and hermit-like tendencies and I remember the first time I ever saw someone doing what I wanted to do for a living: John Travolta was just writing on a laptop on his own couch. About 20 years ago, I was working as an Athletic Director and I asked my tech Guru how long it might be until someone like me could earn a living writing like this from home. He said it shouldn't be longer than a few more years, which turned out to be exactly the case.

It's not too difficult to know when you're writing too much because you start blowing off other things and, more importantly, the quality of your work begins to deteriorate noticeably. With practice, an experienced writer learns how to plan for busy seasons and how to keep up the work quality during peak season. Just as is the case with many other jobs, you'll often find yourself with no alternative to working constantly, but by the time you've been doing this for any length of time, you learn how to prioritize your work and make short-term corresponding changes to the rest of your life so that you can focus on your work and on making more money than you do for most of the rest of the year. We are well designed to adapt to large work loads periodically, which hardly poses the same challenges as having to deal with that volume of work and the stress associated with it over longer periods of time, or on a permanent basis rather than according to predictable relatively short term situations.

To a large degree, modern universities rely on writing assignments instead of teaching. If they restricted academic writing assignments to students whose career paths actually required a significant amount of writing (let alone research writing), this entire industry would probably all but disappear in a flash.

If you're really that concerned, just copy/paste it into Word and then manually remove the headers and footers and clean up the spacing in between paragraphs.

Probably just because he thought he could get away with it. I think he learned a valuable lesson that you're only anonymous online until you give someone enough of a reason to devote the resources necessary to find out who you are.

Furthermore, even when ESL clients ask for simpler language, as they sometimes do, they still don't want any grammatical errors or misused words or idioms. "Simple" in this context just means less-complex sentences and less-advanced vocabulary, not outright errors in punctuation and grammar. Most of them would like to improve their own writing from reading ours, which they can't do if the projects they receive from us have the same kinds of mistakes that they could make on their own without paying anybody a premium for bad writing.

Unless a student buys an essay from someone at the same school, I think the chances of that are so exceptionally small as to be negligible. The real risk is simply that modern plagiarism scanners will ID projects that have already been submitted at any academic institution, worldwide.

The only time a client ever tried this kind of thing with me, I hired a private investigator to determine his identity and then I just contacted him at his college email address because he'd stopped responding from the email he'd used previously. He ended up responding immediately, reissuing payment in full, and he also reimbursed me for the cost of the private investigator, which was more than the price of the project.


This will only help you with a PayPal dispute. Otherwise, if it's an outright attempt to rip you off after delivering a good project, even the best contract won't help you because the problem is the practicality and cost associated with pursuing your claim, even with a "contract" whose terms entitle you to payment.

While it's understandable that the OP was angry at the company, publishing the work in this type of situation is much more likely to harm a customer who did nothing wrong to the writer and who probably had no idea that the writer didn't get paid for the project.

It's all semantics. There's always a contractual relationship irrespective of whether or not it's in writing. Whatever the agreement or mutual understanding is (such as relating to pay rates) between writers and companies constitutes their contract, notwithstanding the difficulty of proving the terms of a verbal contract in any adversarial controversy where the terms of the agreement are material to the dispute, but that's a totally separate issue (of proof, not of whether or not a valid contract exists). A simple email exchange that says "We'll pay you $20 per page and all of your work for us must be original writing, delivered on time, and must always conform to the project specs" is an enforceable contract; so is a verbal conversation communicating the same without anything in writing at all. Generally, informal verbal agreements are contracts and they're just as valid and enforceable as formal written contracts; their terms are just much harder to prove in any dispute because there's nothing in writing. (Please note that when I say "enforceable," that just means it's no less valid or enforceable as a matter of law; it doesn't mean that proving your case is as easy as doing so when there's documentary evidence in the form of a written contract that can be used to make your argument and prove your claim to whatever extent the terms of the agreement are relevant to the dispute.)

I always referred to myself as having "written for" essay companies rather than as having been "employed" by them, simply because an independent contractor isn't really an "employee." The term "affiliated" is also somewhat inaccurate, IMO, because that term typically has a very different specific meaning in this industry, often referring to separate companies that have arrangements with one another to share customer orders and/or pools of writers.

Even clients who don't intend to submit the work for a grade still want a high-quality product from which they can learn how to write, as well as how to do research and organize an academic project. If someone can't provide a project in grammatically-correct English, he has no business taking money for his work, unless the client knows the writing will be flawed and agrees (in advance) to accept that kind of work. In my experience, even ESL clients who don't want conspicuously-complex writing or advanced vocabulary still want something that's well written and without grammatical errors.

I had the opposite experience: nothing made me appreciate doing this for a living more than waking up to an alarm clock Monday through Friday and spending my weekends just catching up on sleep and doing chores like laundry and food shopping and, basically, just preparing for another 5-day work week.

Just out of curiosity, what's the advantage (from the customer's perspective) of searching for a writer on FB instead of just searching via traditional methods online?

As someone with zero social media presence who doesn't use any of those platforms (or even own a smart phone), I'm curious how any of that even works and why they've attracted the scammers in this industry.

Thank you. One reason that we're so reliable is simply that some of us are actually the exact same writers who might have been writing your projects if you had ordered them from the best essay companies in the business anytime between at least 2003 (1998 for 1 of us) and roughly 2013. I haven't written any projects for any essay companies since late 2013, but for most of the first 5 years that I was active on this forum, I was one of 4 writers here who were the top writers (out of hundreds) at the biggest and best company in this business, only 1 of whom didn't use the exact same S/N here as his essay company ID. One of them left this business after taking a more traditional fulltime writing job a few years ago, another recently retired, and one died suddenly in 2015. In fact, what annoyed me the most about some of the posts from someone in this business who often warned forum readers never to trust any freelance writer here and who recommended only trusting essay companies is that the individual posting those comments knew exactly who the 4 of us are (including our real names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and our essay company account earnings and other such details) and that we were the best writers at the very company from which this individual derives an income.

I don't know any reputable writers who resell any of their own work. Anything I write belongs to the client once it's paid for. If you read the fine print in the TOS of most essay companies, they either allow them to resell the work without restriction or they promise not to do so for several months after the work is provided to the customer.

The reason American and British customers prefer American and British writers is that the vast majority of ESL writers simply cannot write English sufficiently well to meet the minimum standards of high-level academic writing in English. The problem is that most ESL writers don't understand the difference between speaking English (even quite fluently) and writing English that sounds like American (or British) English to NES readers. At best, even their otherwise good academic writing is always full of misused words, phrases, and idioms that immediately tip off any readers (especially professional educators) that, however good the research and substantive content, it was obviously written by someone whose first language is not English.

Yes, it's true that some ESL writers do actually write better than many NES students, in some respects. The problem (to which most ESL writers are totally oblivious) is that the kinds of writing mistakes typically made by bad NES writers are completely different from the kinds of mistakes typically made by (even very good) ESL writers. Most American and British customers just don't have any use for essays full of glaringly-obvious signs that the writer speaks English as a second language, even if the substantive content is pretty good. Unlike the differences between American and British English, there's no way of simply "converting" ESL writing into idiomatically-correct English with a program and it isn't possible for most ESL writers to choose to write in idiomatically-correct English at will the way good American writers can learn how to write in perfect British English with a little practice.

The flawed assumption in the OP's question is that customers prefer American-based sites because of their geographical location. If the work is good, nobody cares where the provider is located. The main reason that customers have learned to care is simply that the vast majority of essay companies situated outside of countries where English is the primary language do not provide high-quality writing that is comparable to the writing of NES writers. The secondary reason is that foreign companies aren't subject to domestic laws that protect consumers. Even that wouldn't matter so much if companies located in the 2nd and 3rd World represented their locations honestly, because customers would be able to weigh the relative benefits and risks in relation to price differences in an informed way. The problem is that many foreign-based essay companies targeting 1st-World NES customers have devoted considerable effort to misrepresenting their location for the express purpose of deceiving American, British, and Australian customers who have learned to prefer NES writers and who want the relative security of 1st-World statutory consumer protection mechanisms (or simply whatever protection domestic laws provide in their own countries). But for the fact that the vast majority of ESL writers don't provide work that is even remotely comparable to that produced by NES writers and but for the fact that so many scam companies deliberately misrepresent their geographical location, this would never have become such an important issue in this industry the first place.

Scam companies and writers aren't worried about being hired again, because their entire "business model" is to scam each customer once or twice and then just change their company name and/or email address as soon as public complaints against them start to pile up. That's why your best bet is always to use someone who's been operating under the same S/N and/or company name and/or email for many years.

In my experience, most clients do want the highest possible grades; and the relatively few who don't will usually let you know.

Why would you think that someone obviously incapable of typing out a simple 3-sentence forum post in grammatically-correct English is capable of earning a living as an academic writer?