My loose familiarity with the IDs of some of the higher-profile company writers and with how a few of them were let go by their companies suggested to me that there were two most common general patterns: (1) New writers who started racking up customer complaints about plagiarism and/or other basic problems with their work. Usually, the negative comments, complaints, and requests not to receive work from a bad new writer piled up fast and they were let go fairly quickly. (2) Established writers whose work had previously always been good enough to establish solid reputations going back several years, but who were losing focus, typically to some degree of self-imposed burnout. They start taking liberties in the form of various elements of plagiarism and purposely take assignments of the same project many different times so that they can basically rewrite them from memory or skip any research time by reusing all of the same references they relied upon the last 4 times they covered Enron or Deepwater Horizon or Uber or the last dozen times they "analyzed" the same work, such as The Yellow Wallpaper or Dr. Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. When they got fired, it was usually after being given several chances to promise to deliver only the quality of the work they'd always delivered previously and after relapsing several times into patterns of bad projects, late delivery, and non-delivery of projects.

That makes sense. Ordinarily, US thesis advisors and dissertation review committees are quite reasonable and don't demand extensive revisions unless there's at least arguably something deficient in the submission. That still reflects the subjective view of the reviewers; but at least in US programs, it's often quite possible to have the first submission approved without revisions. That is relatively rare when it comes to UK reviewers, even when the submission mirrors the approach and structure of approved previous submissions. They seem to view revisions as part of a necessary "process" practically regardless of the quality of the first submission. Some of them probably enjoy kicking cats, too.

F that. I love animals and I'll help out even a temperamental one in need, but I'm never giving a permanent home to one that's mean or that lashes out at me in anger. Someone else can give those cats homes. I picked up a juvenile Russian Blue off the street about 20 years ago who was clearly ill. He purred when I picked him up and crawled into my lap in the car on the way to the vet. He was pretty nice after I got him home, but when I gently moved him out of my way on the couch or stopped him from doing anything he wasn't allowed to do, he'd bite. Found him another home immediately with someone else who didn't mind dealing with that. My house = my rules; and no aggressiveness from pets allowed, because I'm too nice to my pets to put up with anything different from them. There are way too many nicer cats who need homes for me to deal with that.

Mine was actually very nice and I've only met a few that were nicer. We could pick him up anytime, hold him upside down, stretch him out upside down so he looked like Superman flying upside down, throw him over our shoulders and walk around with him draped over us, clip his nails with him purring, stick medication down his throat, etc. He greeted people at the door much like a dog, and also learned what surfaces (and sinks) he wasn't allowed on, what he wasn't allowed to scratch, and that he was allowed on the terrace (16th Floor) but not to jump up on the rail or go after birds. Still, you know the old joke:

Q: What's better than the nicest, sweetest, most appreciative, smartest, and most affectionate cat in the whole world?
A: Any dog.

He crawled into anything resembling a bag or a box and anytime he discovered a new one, that would become his spot for weeks. If a large package came that we didn't open right away or my hockey bag was packed for a game and zipped up, he'd stand in front of it with his front paws on it, look back at me and give an annoyed meow that probably meant "Hey, would you mind getting your crap outta my bag?" We had to put him down 2 years ago at age 15. I'm open to getting another one whenever my wife is ready for that. I like cats, but I don't get as bonded or attached to them as to dogs, because most of them are more independent and seemingly less appreciative than dogs. I know there are some that are much more like dogs and I hope our next cat is one of them.

Sometimes, even the legitimate companies abuse writers on a case-by-case basis, depending (from what I've observed) on the personality and degree of vulnerability of individual writers. About 7 years ago, I met another writer here who used the exact same ID on this forum as his company ID, just as I always have. He was as good a writer as I am and we used to back one another up with emergencies as well as protect each other on the company assignment board. We'd alert one another to customer requests for us on the board and if we didn't get a quick response, we'd take those orders off the board ourselves before they could be stolen by other writers who didn't respect the rule about not taking orders requesting a specific writer and then email to let one another (and the company) know that we had the project so that it could be reassigned and moved to the right writer's account afterwards if he indicated that he wanted it. (At that time, only the "honor system" protected those orders from being taken by any of their other hundreds of writers. Later, their system displayed those orders only to the requested writer for a 3-hour period and we often did the same thing for one another as soon as we noticed that a request for one another had just gone public after the 3-hour reserve period expired.)

He continued doing much more company work than I did long after I made the successful transition to independence as a writer and would sometimes either vent to me or seek my advice in dealing with issues with customer service reps at the company. According to him, they routinely assigned him orders that he hadn't chosen to accept and they often demanded (unpaid) rewrites to accommodate customers who changed their specs after he'd already started their orders as well as after he'd completed and delivered their projects. In my personal experience at the same company, they'd always asked me first how many extra pages to charge the client for either of those two situations; and the first time that they ever "assigned" an order to me by placing a customer's request for me on my account that I hadn't chosen to accept was the last time, because I told them immediately and in no uncertain terms that according to their contract, I was strictly a freelance contractor and not an employee and that email notifications of requests for me were appreciated, but that I never wanted any assignment ever "placed" on my account by anybody else unless I'd made the decision to take the order. It never happened again. In the event I received a ridiculous unjustified rewrite request, I simply uploaded the original file to the system to clear it off my account and instructed the customer to contact Customer Service with any questions; and I emailed CS explaining why the request was ridiculous and indicated the appropriate number of additional pages to charge the customer for the request. If the customer paid, the rewrite would appear on the assignment board as a new request for me and if the customer didn't pay, I'd never hear anything more about that project. It never even occurred to me that other writers at the same company might be experiencing a radically different relationship with the same company reps.

What really shocked me was the tone of the emails that he shared with me from the company. The same representative who had always communicated with me only appropriately and respectfully communicated very harsh-sounding demands to this other writer to rewrite orders immediately whose specs changed after delivery and outright threatened him about deducting his entire pay for those orders if he refused. According to him, this was how they'd always treated him and he'd often been forced to do unpaid rewrites on projects for reasons that were completely ridiculous, such as where the customer simply changed his mind about the topic after receiving the project. My conclusion from what I learned from his shared company emails and from hearing his personality the one time we spoke by phone was that he'd made the mistake of setting that tone with them as a function of his personality and by making it fairly obvious that he just wasn't the type of person who was comfortable sticking up for himself or refusing to let anybody take advantage of him.

Incidentally, for PV or JM or anybody else who recognizes the writer involved, he died of an apparent heart attack in June of 2015. His partner provided that info from his email account in response to an email I sent him, coincidentally, 3 or 4 days later, which I subsequently confirmed by finding his obituary published in his local newspaper in WA. I suspect that PV enjoyed the same kind of relationship as I did with the CS rep involved and would be equally shocked by the treatment this other writer experienced from the same company that was always appropriate and respectful to us.

They sure do. The single biggest waste of my time is having to respond to the concerns of skittish new clients worried about getting ripped off, especially after they've already been ripped off by one or more scamming competitors whose websites are expressly designed to convince prospective customers that they're legit and whose ridiculously low prices, with which I can't possibly compete, are merely part of that whole scam. I can't think of any other industry where I'd have to reassure new customers, almost daily, that I'm a legit provider and will deliver exactly what they order, especially after having providing the highest-quality services under the same ID for almost 20 years. I understand their concerns completely and I try to be as patient as possible with them, but it's a tremendous time-waster to have to deal with constantly. It also skews prospective customers' expectations about appropriate prices for the high-quality work they're seeking.

In my experience, the only way this issue really ever comes up is where a new customer doesn't understand that there are no free revisions for anything not communicated and requested clearly and specifically in the original order. That's another reason why I won't have those types of conversations by phone, where it's up to both of us to interpret and remember what was (and wasn't) discussed. I use my FAQs to make clear that objective mistakes on my part (such as answering the wrong prompt or leaving out a requested section) are always free fixes, but that subjective editorial opinions, (such as how the client might have used space differently or what subtopics he or she might have included) are never free fixes. My regular clients sometimes ask for revisions based on feedback they receive from professors about their submissions, but they fully understand that these are always paid edits if I made no mistake and they simply ask for the price when they communicate their revision requests.

Recently, a regular client indicated that the professor radically changed the guidelines for the whole assignment after I delivered it and demanded (essentially) entirely different essays for the assignment on the same day that it was originally due by me to the client. The client paid me to write roughly 80% of the project all over again but understood that this kind of thing is caused by the professor and not the fault of the writer. In the past, I've had new clients who did not immediately understand that kind of thing until I explained it. Other times, I've had clients order a simple project for a Composition course and then request a free "revision" a week later, after the professor gave them follow-up assignments to change the original essay by incorporating a new issue from the class discussion or from another reading from the course. In those cases, I actually had to explain that no project includes subsequent "revisions" to include additional requests from professors issued after their submission (or my delivery) of the original project, and that I'm more than happy to continue developing the same project according to weekly additions to the specs, but that each one of those additions must (obviously) be paid for the additional work that it represents.

*Quote edited to meet the word-count limitation of quotes on this forum.

I raised a black lab for 11 years from the day she was born, after finding homes for her mother and all 7 of her littermates in college. I've had a lot of interaction with other dogs both before and since, but I can't own another one without giving up my apartment where I've lived for almost 20 years; it's the apartment where I was raised and I kept it after my dad died a few years after I gave up my previous apartment in Riverdale to help take care of him in his final years. This building allows cats and caged animals but has never allowed dogs and I don't think I'd get one in another apartment again, anyway, because it's just not the same as having a house and fenced-in property for the dog to run around and be a dog all day. As someone who never had the slightest interest in having kids, my only real regret in life is that I'll probably never have another dog of my own. One of the things I don't miss about having a dog is (unavoidably) running into all the other people with dogs regularly; the other thing is that for almost 11 years, I was never away from my apartment for more than 8 or 10 hours at a time except for the few times that I had neighbors take care of her for a day or two.

She was just awesome: her name was "Layla" (Eric Clapton) and in my old building, everybody loved her, even the stray cat that hung around for years. Layla was friends with every other living creature she ever met and she was so well-trained that the littlest kids in the building thought she could actually understand their complete English sentences because of how well she understood all the phrases that I used as commands and because I always said "please" and "thank you" to her. I had to teach them to say them with the same inflection that I used so she'd listen to them, too. She loved Frisbees more than anything and learned that the black one was hers and the white one was mine; so we could have two tosses going on simultaneously with my friends and without her ever chasing (and chewing up) the wrong one. Putting her down was the single hardest thing I ever had to do and I did it myself at home with her in my lap because she was terrified of the vet table and I didn't want her shivering on that cold table to be her last experience. I sat on the floor in our apartment with her cradled in my arms as I felt her breathing slow and then her heart beat until it beat one last time. I just wish my wife and I had met 5 years earlier so they could have known each other because they'd have adored each other, just like every girl I ever dated for that 11 years.

In my opinion, it's a lot simpler and doesn't typically involve terms in fine print or pro-rata calculation methods. The most common situation is that the "guarantee" is simply an outright lie on which the company has no intention of ever following through in the first place. It provides a competitive advantage over companies and writers who don't advertise any such claim to whatever extent inexperienced customers actually believe and fall for that "guarantee." This forum is replete with examples of such cases where customers found out that these kinds of guarantees mean absolutely nothing as soon as they tried to request a refund. As the old rule says, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

A legit company or writer will always provide free fixes for genuine mistakes, but nobody legit offers any kind of blanket "guarantee" to refund a payment simply because a customer says he's "not satisfied" with the product after delivery, and unless the writer fails to follow the original instructions, nobody has any right to expect a refund based on subjective satisfaction where there wasn't some outright objective mistake or omission in the project. In principle, it's not much different from ordering a meal in a restaurant: If a customer asks for a refund because there was an insect or a piece of glass in his food, he'll either get a different meal for free or sincere apologies and no bill on the bad meal. Conversely, if a customer requests a refund for the meal because he says he just "didn't like it," a restaurant owner would be perfectly right to tell that customer to order a different item from the menu next time, or to try a different restaurant altogether.

I've always been a dog person, but my building doesn't allow dogs, unfortunately.

• 
  ZippyInBag.jpg
  
• 
  ZippySink.jpg
  

No problem. It's neither the first nor the last time that a totally legit writer is maliciously attacked without any basis whatsoever.

Likewise, Wordsies and I have referred clients and projects to one another several times in the last few years and I know him to be a legit writer. I have no idea how someone has the nerve to register an account here and then start accusing professional writers who have been here for years without any complaints from clients and about whom he knows absolutely nothing of being "scams" within an hour of registering.

We writers aren't allowed to offer you our services that way, either. If you just take a little time to familiarize yourself with the forum, you should be able to figure out how to contact anybody you'd like to contact in a way that we're permitted to respond. Do that instead of posting more public requests to which we're not allowed to respond without violating the rules.

If you familiarize yourself with the forum and its rules, you'll see that nobody is allowed to do that. What you can do is use the search function here to help you figure out who is likely to be trustworthy. Change the default "Topic Titles" to "Messages" so your search results aren't limited just to thread titles.

I'm amazed that anybody who actually does this kind of writing for a living uses anything even remotely close to 20% quotes. That means the writer (or company) is copying and pasting as much as a full page out of every 5 pages delivered. In my experience, only students really struggling to fill a minimum page count use direct quotes in most of their essays. Typically, high school and college students try to string together a lot of block quotes throughout their essays, connected with very little original writing, mainly to reduce the amount of actual writing they have to do. It's almost never necessary to use verbatim quotes, let alone a whole page's worth of them for every 5 (or even 10) paid written pages. Unless it's for a literature project or a biography or some other type of project in which the actual words of someone else are particularly relevant, I probably use any direct quotes in maybe 1 project out of 10, let alone a whole page's worth of quotes for every 5 (or 10) written pages of every project. In my opinion, direct quotes are usually the mark of a rank amateur in this business. No offense intended specifically to your friend, because this is something I've explained here several times previously over the last decade.


Agreed. I've also asked this many times.

If you didn't submit the work (and don't plan to), there's really nothing to report. You can always say that you only intended to use the work, properly, as a guide for your own work. You can also tell them that if they don't stop threatening you or if they contact your school, you'll alert PayPal to their threats to harm you to coerce you to close a legitimate dispute instead of allowing PayPal to go through its dispute process and that PayPal will investigate and could terminate their account for it.

Why would you divulge to them where you go to school in the first place?

By now, it should be pretty easy to identify legit providers using the information available right on this forum. Consider those listed under the "Reviewed" banner at the top of the page. While we pay to be listed there, we probably wouldn't last very long if we didn't satisfy our clients. Do a search here for any provider you're considering, but always change the default "Titles" to "Messages" so that your returns aren't limited just to thread titles mentioning the searched term.

300 words per page is the standard maximum in this industry, with an average of about 285. Clients can always order single-spacing or a smaller font (or anything else that increases the number of words per page), but if they do that, they're going to pay by word count instead of by the page. No company or writer I know allows clients to "specify" or "format" their way into doubling the amount of writing they're going to get for a specific number of paid pages.

Not only have I written hundreds of Science projects for STEM students, but I've written 100+ projects in Technology, dozens in Engineering, and about a half a dozen in Mathematics. STEM students still have to satisfy requirements outside of their majors that require writing, too. Sometimes, they've inquired about projects that were beyond my ability to take on with confidence, and I have no idea what they ended up doing to satisfy those assignments.

Still not going to start using Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter anytime soon.

Agreed. In addition, those of us who have written for companies and also for our direct clients are definitely more careful about the work we do for our direct clients because if they're not happy, it's our reputation on the line. That's not to say that most of us didn't also do good work as company writers; but we're just not as concerned about those companies' reputations as about our own. For one example, if I ever found myself having to choose between missing a deadline for a private client or missing a deadline for a company project, it was definitely the private client's project that got finished before the deadline and the company client who got a politely-worded apology about the delay and a new ETA. I believe that's always the case with any writer who has both private and company clients.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, it's the students capable of writing A papers who don't bother coming to class at all, especially if the grade in the class is substantially based on the paper. As a junior and senior in college, I "majored" in one particular history professor, precisely because he assigned one paper for each of his courses and that paper determined your whole grade. I did the same thing through law school after my first year, because (with the exception of 1 or 2 Legal Writing classes), the final exam was the only determinant of our grades. In my experience writing essays for a living for almost 20 years, fewer than 1 in every 100 clients do anything more than add a cover page before handing in whatever I write for them. In fact, I've had more clients actually request the cover page done for them than clients who plan on "rewriting" anything in the essay. They're not paying us to leave any writing to them.

Agreed. "A few days" is plenty of time for any professional writer to turn around 5 pages; but it's probably not enough time to start looking for a writer without risking your deadline.

It's really none of my business whatsoever whether my clients actually use my work as a model for their own writing or choose to submit it for academic credit; but I'm not going to tie myself into a convoluted illogical knot to try to claim that it's "not cheating" if they choose to do the latter. I write whatever they order and once I deliver the project, my clients own the work and can do whatever they want to do with it.


I'm sorry, but "tutors" teach outside of class; they don't provide work that gets submitted by the student for a grade. If what you mean to say is that students who submit purchased essays for credit still learn in school if they study hard enough to do well on their in-class exams, and that doing well on in-class exams makes it much less likely that anybody would ever suspect that the student didn't write his own essays, I wouldn't disagree with either of those suggestions. However, to say that good performance on an in-class exam means that turning in an essay written by someone else "isn't" cheating on that assignment is just silly.

Also, I have no idea how you get from this


to this


especially as consecutive sentences.

I can't even imagine what kind of "trouble" the OP was worried about. A former professor might cause you a problem if he finds out that you hired a writer when you were a student, but not if he finds out that you're looking for work as a writer, yourself.

In almost 20 years of doing this and 8,000 - 10,000 projects, fewer than 10 of those projects included any kind of request to leave the project unfinished so that the client could add some more writing to my work. The other 7,990 - 9,990 would all have demanded (and been entitled to) free revisions if I'd ever delivered any projects and told them that they were nearly complete or that their projects had been "started on the track of getting a good grade" for them to finish writing. Frankly, unless someone specifically asks me to write something at a relatively low level, very few students are ever going to be able to mix their writing with my writing in the same project without it being extremely obvious to anybody that two different people contributed to the writing. Most of the time, the reason they hire me is, precisely, because they can't write as well as a professional writer.

I usually just respond that grading is subjective but that I'm confident that I can produce an essay likely to be considered "A" quality by any reader, if that's the case.

I don't keep a regular schedule at all: sometimes I sleep at night and other times I work through the night and sleep during the day. Generally, I'll do what I can to help my clients out (and to get new clients' future business) by taking on their last-minute emergencies; however, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm available at anybody's beck and call 24/7/365 or that I won't charge for the inconvenience of having to change my own plans to accommodate someone's needs. I workout almost every day, I have hockey games and practices, I'm the VP of my co-op's board of directors (which also involves a lot of writing), my wife and I sometimes make plans, I like lying in the sun when it's nice out, and I also need a certain amount of downtime after writing all night (or all day, as the case may be).

If I have to change my own plans about any of that (especially if I also have to start scrambling to contact my other clients to find out who can afford to give me a last-minute deadline extension) just to fit in someone else's emergency project, you can bet that I'm going to charge enough to make that inconvenience worth my trouble. In most cases, the rush is only necessitated in the first place because the client waited until the very last minute to contact me and not because a professor assigned a project with a one-day (or 6-hour) deadline. Someone else's procrastination is not my emergency unless it's worth it to me to make up for the inconvenience. Conversely, if I make a rare mistake that justifies an emergency revision to make a deadline, that's a totally different story and I'll drop whatever I'm doing (except making someone else's deadline) to get it done ASAP. If the emergency rush is my fault, that's legitimately my problem; if it's not my fault, it's not my problem unless it's worth it to me to make it my problem.

Generally, the only time I need customers' ID info is when they want to pay by Western Union.

Regardless of the OP's intentions, I'm just fascinated by the presumptuousness and pomposity of someone's joining any online forum and then immediately starting a thread presuming to "remind" that entire pre-existing community of many long-time members about the "purpose" of the forum.

They probably get scammed because they've grown up with the Internet and have been ordering products and services online for as long as they can remember. They don't realize that this particular industry is saturated with scams that far outnumber legitimate providers. They don't start doing their research into figuring out how to identify legitimate providers until after their first experience wakes them up to the reality of this industry.

Because, as is the case with many people who join all sorts of online forums, they don't read through old threads or the FAQs first; they just post whatever question they signed up to ask.

I don't have any of that crap simply because I don't "do" social media...no FB, IG, not a tweeter...barely even use a cell phone, and it's my wife's old Razzor...nobody has the number besides her and there's no data in it because it's nothing to me but a road "pay phone." At home, it's always off and doesn't take messages because I still use a hardline. The only time I ever video-conferenced in any form was working for the federal government.


Actually, there's almost never been any reason justifying a phone call with a client, but I've always offered to talk if (and only if) what the client wanted was to verify that I'm in NYC (212 hardline) and that I have no foreign accent (and that I speak the way I write). Lately, I offered to have a couple of them call me because it's just faster than typing out how I handle projects that require a "draft" and a final essay subsequently. Generally, I don't like discussing anything substantive about projects because I want all communications in written form to prevent any possible miscommunications that can't be definitively resolved factually.

I've worked very hard for a long time to become semi-established and somewhat recognized as one of the best providers in this industry. I see no advantage or value to providing assistance to some guys who probably never wrote anything for anybody but just decided that this might be a good business to start so that some writers they find might do all the work necessary for their business to make them money. Instead, I'd suggest that if they're so interested in getting into this biz, they should just start writing some projects and see how that goes. Writers aren't alpacas and you don't just decide that you're going to start raising and selling us on your property, at least not with any help from me doing it.

I'd respectfully disagree with all of the above post, especially this part.


If all academic writing for hire is a "scam" just because of the nature of the service, there'd be absolutely no purpose to the existence of this entire forum. The meaningful distinction is (or should be) between providers who actually deliver the product for which they accept payment and providers who just collect payments without ever delivering the product or who deliver a product that isn't anything remotely close to what the provider purported to offer, such as plagiarized content or writing that barely qualifies as either "academic" or "English."

For the purpose of any meaningful and sensible discussion, providers who don't intend to deliver what they promise to deliver and routinely fail to are "scams" and those who provide exactly what they promise to provide are not "scams." Whatever broader ethical points you want to make about the practice of purchasing custom-written academic essays has nothing to do with the distinction between scams that exist only to rip off their customers and legitimate service providers who are in this business to make a living by delivering exactly what their customers pay them for.

Gender is roughly 50/50. According to PayPal, the geographic data of my customers for 2018 is as follows:

Country/ Number of transactions

United States 183
United Kingdom48
Australia 28
Canada 25
New Zealand 4
Singapore 10
Denmark 2
Taiwan 5
Ireland 3
Netherlands 2

I believe the OP's point was that his work is being used by Turnitin to add value to their product and to enrich them, not that they're actually "stealing" the content of his work.


Wasn't your initial argument that the writer has no right to complain because it's the customer who owns the copyright to the work? If that's your premise, what gives the professor the right to upload it to Turnitin when the professor doesn't own the copyright, either?

@minks
You should spend a little time familiarizing yourself with this forum, its rules, the reason nobody's going to respond with a recommendation; and then, use the search function here to research any company or writer you're considering using. (Always change the default "titles" to "messages" so that your search results aren't limited to the titles of old threads.)