Just a few points to address the post above:

1. "Pressing charges" and "lawsuits" are two totally different things: the former refers to criminal matters and the latter refers to civil matters.

2. In this country, lying about a company's location is rarely considered "material" to your agreement or any dispute with most types of business and it's essentially irrelevant with respect to companies providing services delivered online. Many American companies (of all sorts) aren't incorporated anywhere close to where they're actually located. More American companies are probably incorporated in Delaware than in any other state and they have nothing actually situated in Delaware besides a rented mailbox.

3. A "frivolous" lawsuit is one without any legal merit. A lawsuit that isn't worth pursuing because of the cost in relation to the amount of the dispute is futile, not "frivolous."

4. Most of the worst scam companies in this industry are located either in Third-World countries with collapsed or totally corrupt governments or in Second-World countries whose governments already have their hands more than full just providing basic government administration. In this country, the government doesn't take up civil lawsuits "on behalf" of ripped-off customers, even in industries that are highly regulated and licensed. They may eventually prosecute them criminally for various types of consumer fraud; but that's not really much help to ripped-off consumers. Usually, by the time authorities take any action, the companies have already moved on to a different incorporated name. When it comes to totally unregulated industries, the government isn't getting involved in their disputes with their customers.

As prospective customers, just focus on doing your due diligence before choosing a provider rather than worrying about how to retaliate against them after getting ripped off.

Maybe clients have just learned to prefer writers whose knowledge of English includes the difference between "less" and "fewer."

Until relatively recently, PayPal provided no protection at all for anything they considered to be a "virtual product" such as an essay delivered via email. They do now, but they won't consider the academic "quality" of the essay. They will, however, consider disputes if it was written in the wrong language, or in obviously incoherent English, or on a totally different topic than was ordered.


By simply referring to the TOS for the project that should be in your invoice and/or in the note attached to any payment that you accept.

Only the initial stage is automated. Once you escalate to a claim, every dispute is handled and the outcome determined by PayPal representatives (unless the seller fails to respond altogether).


That's not true, even on eBay, where there's a tangible product, let alone intangible products delivered by email.

Only about 1 out of every 10 projects presented to me as a request for "editing" or "proofreading" only need editing or proofreading. About 9 out every 10 of those would need to be written entirely as new projects, because there's almost nothing in them that's usable or salvageable, even content-wise, let alone just the writing. In the last year, exactly one "editing" project proposal really needed only editing and exactly one "proofreading" project proposal really needed only proofreading.

I believe there are scam essay companies in both the US and the UK.

Obviously, writers need to respond promptly to client emails. Other than that, the quality of the work actually provided is, by far, the most important factor in any writer's reputation. My emails are short and sometimes blunt, simply because I'm busy writing projects. Friendly and more engaging emails might be more effective in getting new business from first-time clients; but once clients receive their first projects and know they're always going to get high-quality work delivered on time, they couldn't care less about anything else. For the same reason, I'd much rather take my car to a mechanic who's too busy for long conversations but whose work is always reliable and completed on time than take my car to a mechanic with a great personality who spends more time talking to me and offers me coffee but whose repairs are unreliable and/or not completed by the time promised.

In fact, that's not even just a hypothetical analogy: it's exactly the choice I've made. The Toyota dealership has a very nice waiting area and friendly staff and they provide coffee for customers; but half the time, my car isn't ready by the time they promised and I end up having to take it back in because they forgot to take care of something or because the problem for which I brought it in wasn't fixed properly. Meanwhile, the guy whose little shop in Queens I've used for almost 20 years never has any time for any discussion beyond the quickest possible explanation of the problem and there isn't even anywhere for customers to sit down, but his repairs are always good. The dealership's style of customer service is definitely much more "reassuring" for new customers, but the reason my independent mechanic has kept customers just like me for so many years is precisely because the quality of the work performed is infinitely more important to us than how fuzzy and warm customers feel from our conversations with him. Precisely the same is true when it comes to this business.

Exactly. This is precisely why even a high number of long-term repeat customers generates so few direct referrals; because I'm quite sure that all of them have plenty of friends who need the same services just as much as they do and that they're fully aware of that.

That's actually very much the exception rather than the rule. Once in a while, I do get requests from two or three friends together for different versions of the same project, as well as new clients who mention that a previous client recommended them. However, I get very few one-time clients, because almost every first-time client of mine uses me at least a half a dozen or a dozen times or more, depending mainly on when they found me in their academic careers. If many of them referred just one new client to me, I'd quickly be inundated with more work than I could ever possibly produce. The truth is that most of my clients never admit to anybody where they got their projects for several reasons: (1) They know that college friendships often change or end and that what they admit to someone who might be a "friend" today could easily come back to bite them in the a#$ tomorrow; (2) They're graded on a curve and don't want to share the competitive advantage that my work provides; and (3) They simply prefer to have everybody (friends and family included) believe that they wrote these essays themselves and they probably show them off to their parents as though they really wrote them. In fact, I've had clients who are senior-level managers in government agencies and fairly-high-ranking officers in the armed forces tell me, very specifically, that they'd never even tell their spouses or anybody else in their own families that I wrote their theses and dissertations for them. I've even had people in intimate partnerships place orders for their partners without telling them that because they wanted their partners to think that they wrote their projects for them. So, trust me when I tell you that they're not very often telling their classmates or school friends about this, either.

While I wouldn't necessarily suggest that a nice-looking website always means that the service is shady, I'd agree that most of the worst scam companies do hide behind deceptively legitimate-looking sites designed, precisely, to gain confidence on that specific basis. Typically, they also use 24-hour "chat" systems through which their reps reel in customers by providing only the most accommodating and reassuring answers about any prospective project, such as promising to assign the "perfect" writer who has a "PhD" in the exact field of any prospective project. Meanwhile, some of the best providers in this industry maintain very simple websites and rely exclusively on email to communicate with clients.

I've only taken 3 vacations in the last 15 years that weren't just "staycations" and I ended up writing projects all 3 times, (including en route at 30,000 feet): once in Florida and twice in Switzerland. If existing customers have emergencies, I can't really just leave them hanging if someone I'd trust as a backup writer is unavailable. If it's for new customers, I just can't afford to lose all their future business (possibly for the next several years). Rather just skip one day in the sun or miss seeing one Alp. If you expect regular scheduled vacations (or even regular days off, for that matter), this is the wrong business for you.

While this forum isn't really designed for it, you should have no problem identifying legitimate providers by using the search function here. Just make sure to change the default "messages" to "titles" so your search returns aren't limited to thread titles referring to your search term.

Right. If anything seems sketchy to me about the person or circumstances, it's either Western Union or nothing.

I wouldn't expect that entities intending to collect people's ID info fraudulently would be doing that through scam hiring applications for writers, simply because that's such a limited pool of prospective victims.

In general, a good writer should be able to provide just about any kind of project you need, whether that's a traditional academic essay, resume & cover letter, program application, class forum post, professional blog entry, or business white paper.

With respect to the original response to the OP in this 11-year-old thread that has now been resurrected, this business has changed very significantly since 2007. There is no longer the same (if any) demand for or value in pre-written academic essays as there might still have been back in 2007.

I've definitely had weeks of nearly-constant work at the expense of sleep and health, but only by my choice to take on a lot of projects.

Tomar and I were writing for the same company at the time and his last name is actually the writer ID that he used. He used the pseudonym "Ed Dante" for his magazine article, but I recognized him as soon as his book came out under his real name, along with some of the specific projects he mentions in the book, including the 160-pg International Financial Reporting Standards project that he describes (on p.175) as having remained on the assignment board for weeks in 2009 "untouched" before the payout got bumped up an extra $400. I actually pointed that project out on my screen to my wife at the time and she asked if I was going to take it.

Tomar and I both used to get a lot of customer requests (which is the only way that we writers ever became familiar with any other writer's ID) and I considered him to be one of my toughest competitors for the best projects. My main problems with him are that, as he admits in his article and book: (1) he was dishonest with customers who asked about his academic background, in that he, essentially, told them he had degrees in whatever field matched their projects, and (2) he deliberately padded his projects with a lot of fluff, just to satisfy the page (or word) count.

The only interfaces I've seen are virtual equivalents of traditional bulletin boards. They simply list projects with details and due dates next to tabs that allow writers to take any project on the board on a first-come/first-served basis. When I did a lot of writing for companies, I made several suggestions that they implemented. Most of them had to do with reserving customer requests for specific writers to prevent other writers from stealing them, making it easier for writers to know when new projects got posted, and helping us easily identify and distinguish the newest orders from those that had been sitting on the board for days.

This industry was never about editing or proofreading. Before the Internet, academic ghost writing was advertised in the back pages of magazines. For roughly the first decade of the Internet age, this business was substantially about reselling "stock" essays from the thousands of essays written by writers at each company, as well as the essays that those companies purchased from writers. Some of them used to offer "subscriptions" that allowed students to download a certain number of those stock essays every month. Turnitin and comparable services destroyed the market for stock essays beginning in 2007. Since then, it's been almost exclusively about custom writing. Approximately 1 out of every 100 inquiries I get is just for editing or proofreading.

Because those testimonials would probably be considered "puffery," which is often unethical, in my opinion, but legal. If everything that's unethical were illegal, the advertising industry would cease to exist, at least in its current form and size.

If the requested page count is unrealistic (or totally impossible) for the corresponding specs, I simply explain that and tell the customer how many pages correspond to those specs more realistically.

Most of us consider being able to work from home instead of having to go into an office every day to be one of the biggest advantages to writing for a living; but it's probably also a necessity.

This


is completely inconsistent with this:


Further, that policy suggests that they wouldn't issue a refund even for a blown deadline.

True. I'm in NYC, which is what my IP displays; but my website IP shows Toronto, because that's, apparently, where the company that hosts my site is located.

I believe he was referring to what was written in the assignment specs. If he meant editing the writing, I'd be very interested to see his best editing effort to edit his most recent post to express a clear, logically-coherent thought in grammatically-correct English.

What was the topic and what was the position that this professor favored?

I have no idea what the value is of reviving these nearly-decade-old threads and of addressing the "OP" who registered here in 2009 and never returned after his one and only post on this forum. I doubt the "OP" still has any contact with his university, because whether or not he ever managed to sell his old papers in 2009, he's no longer interested in the response. More importantly, prewritten projects that may still have had some value in 2009 when turnitin was relatively new to the scene would be entirely worthless today.

I just make that explicitly clear in my FAQs and also in our initial communications before payment for the first project with every new client.

Now, all they need to do is also convince all of their professors in those English-speaking countries that it's perfectly OK.

You can't track how much business another writer gets from repeat clients.

If you're a good and versatile writer who provides high-quality work, that should not present a problem.

A writer who produces high-quality work shouldn't ever have any problem finding steady work from essay companies. It takes longer to build up a private clientele; but if your work is good, that isn't too difficult, either.

@naomiking
You've identified yourself as a student, but your posts seem (intentionally) to imply that you're a writer with "clients." Do you mind my asking what your primary language is? (Because it's obvious that it's definitely not English.)

That's because more than 99.9% of duct tape sold isn't intended for that purpose. A much better analogy for academic projects would be rolling papers and bongs, because 99% of them aren't being used to smoke "tobacco" and their manufacturers know that. Likewise, 99% of customers in this industry aren't paying this kind of money just for essays that they plan on using only as "models" for their own writing. Let's not pretend we believe otherwise because it's just ridiculous.

Sometimes, it's impossible no matter how well you anticipate all reasonably-foreseeable problems. A new client ordered a healthcare literature review from me last Friday, asking for it no later than 11:59 PM Sunday night. I was proofreading it and preparing to send it off six hours early last night when an email came in from that client indicating that she needed to have the topic approved. Obviously, I sent the project immediately, together with the response that I'd be more than happy to write another literature review on any other topic if the disease I chose got rejected, but that it would be for the same price as the first one because details such as topic approval always need to be shared with me at the time the order is placed and not six hours before a two-day deadline.

The client didn't argue about it, but about an hour or two later, after sending the completed project, I received another email asking me for a response to the professor's questions asking what the chosen disease was, what patient population was involved, and for two of the source articles that would be used. I responded that I'd already provided more text than was ordered, 15 sources instead of the minimum of 5 sources, and that I'd delivered the project earlier than promised; so I really don't appreciate having to stop working on my next deadline to read and respond to emails that require me to answer questions like that when the disease is right in the title and mentioned a half-dozen or more times on each page. I explained that the patient population was almost as easy to find by using the search function for the word "population" or maybe by just reading the project. I also sent the two requested articles with an explanation that if you need them, that's another thing that I always need to know when you place an order, because I don't necessarily save source materials for every project, otherwise.

One of the few clients from whom I ever took work through Elance was a veterinarian who needed a series of blog-type pieces for his website.

A good start might be to use the search function on this forum for any writer you might be considering. Just make sure to change the default "Topic Titles" to "Messages" so your returns aren't limited to thread titles.

All (intentional) plagiarism is cheating; but not all cheating necessarily involves plagiarism. Plagiarism only refers to the originality of your writing and/or to the full, proper, and sufficient disclosure of any sources of every unoriginal idea in your work. Turning in a piece of writing that you paid someone else to write is (obviously) cheating, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with plagiarism as long as nothing in the work is (also) plagiarized or (deliberately) improperly or insufficiently cited. I'm not passing judgment and it's absolutely none of my business how my clients choose to use my work, because anything they pay me to write belongs to them once they receive it. But since this decade-old thread has been resurrected, I'm just answering the OP's question.

I understand why customers might want to use a plagiarism scanner on work they didn't write themselves, but not writers. If you already know that everything you write comes directly from your mind, there should be no need to scan anything. IMO, using a scanner suggests that you copied something from somewhere (or recycled something you wrote previously) and just want to see whether or not a scanner will flag it.

As a company writer, most of the projects I took paid the maximum my companies paid anybody at the time ($20 except for projects that had bonuses added to them), but only because I specialized in taking rush orders due within 24 hours. Writers weren't "supposed" to do that, but that rule was never enforced to my knowledge.

As a writer for essay companies, I never had any control over what other writers they hired or how they marketed themselves; generally, I never knew what those companies published on their customer-facing websites, because I never really had any reason to visit them. My only experience was taking as many orders from the assignment board as I could manage, completing them all on time and to the best of my ability, and, quite often, then taking more projects from the same customers when they specifically requested me.