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.

I've never encountered any company that paid more frequently than once a month or once every two weeks.

While I've had dozens of referrals over the years, that number is definitely not proportionate to the number of satisfied clients who've used me for months or years. If only 10% of my satisfied clients had referred friends to me, I'd have had hundreds of referrals instead of just dozens. My guess is that they don't want to admit to anybody that they didn't write those projects, both for self-preservation (in case those friendships change) as well as because they take some pride in claiming to have written the work even if they know they didn't actually write it. (Clients don't go home and show their parents their A papers and admit to having purchased them; they display them proudly as though they wrote every word even if the only thing they contributed was the cover page.)

Correct. However, after thousands of projects, I've gotten pretty good at recognizing elements of instructions that are either unrealistic or inconsistent with other elements of the instructions, and at anticipating what ambiguities in the instructions could potentially generate a problem. Anytime possible, I'll try to anticipate and address potential problems in advance and discuss them with the client to make sure we're on the same page about what's expected. Other times, clients will make additional requests that were never part of the original instructions at all after the project is already done. In those cases, the choices are to pay for the extra work or just handle the changes themselves.

If we're being entirely honest, that would, essentially, rule out this entire line of work for the same reason as it would rule out the business of manufacturing rolling papers and bongs if their manufacturers had qualms about anybody using those products to smoke anything but tobacco.

1. There's really no such thing as a "regular" 40-hour work-week. Your earnings as a self-admitted "bad ESL writer" are limited to how many students are satisfied with bad ESL writing. I don't know any, because even ESL students with poor English skills typically want much better writing that that which they are capable of writing, themselves.

2. It depends on how successful you are marketing your skills.

3. None, other than maybe working for better essay companies.

4. In the US, most employers will probably only react with interested surprise that you earned a living this way and will be impressed that you could do it. In Europe, many more employers might have an issue with it. In any case, it's usually your choice to divulge it or not. Chances are the attitudes you encounter will probably be quite similar for PhD programs in the US and in Europe, respectively.

Always do your research; but try to order a short project before you order a much longer project, regardless of what company or writer you're considering.

As a company writer, I was never fined. I don't know whether any of my fellow writers got fined; but I'd have left the company after the first time.

Even through an automated system, anytime an unjustified rewrite request came in, all we had to do was respond with an explanation of why the request was unjustified and then re-upload the original file to clear the request from our accounts. My responses usually included a note suggesting that they contact Customer Service if they disagreed. Anytime it was a legitimate request, I'd handle it ASAP and the company knew that; so they didn't usually bother me with any requests that I rejected. They just explained to the customers why whatever additional work they were requesting had to be paid for as extra work.

People continue to fall for this simply because, like you, they only start doing their due diligence after paying, and only once they begin to realize that they got ripped off. The amount of investigation you need to do to identify these kinds of problems really isn't extensive (or prohibitively difficult); but the right time to do it is before you decide to trust anybody with your money, not afterwards.

This is precisely why there's a market for professional academic writers. The day that professors start assigning writing projects only to students who are likely to do much writing in their careers (beyond emails and other routine written communications) is the day that this entire industry collapses.

In my experience, they do not, because that would involve too much time with the volume of work companies produce. Typically, some of them just run all of their writers' projects (automatically) through some plagiarism scanner and programs that flag any emails or phone numbers to prevent writers and customers from establishing direct contact. They're not reading through projects unless or until there's some specific complaint from a customer.

The OP posted this two years ago and never posted anything else on this forum after that. I suspect the only real purpose of that post was to advertise his services, hoping students might contact him through PMs. If you think about it, there was no other reason for posting the entire contents of that supposed letter. If the OP really just wanted an answer to his questions, there really was no need for anything in between the very first and the very last two lines of his post.

Since this ancient thread has been resurrected, I'll provide a quick response to this:


That's probably not the clause to which anybody was referring. The other clause permits them to use anything scanned "for the purpose of marketing Viper or any associated website of the Company." "Marketing" could include posting parts of those essays as "samples" or even making their full text available on their sites for free download. I don't think anybody had any problem with the specific clause to which "Jennifer" was referring and that she defended above.

Writers who don't plagiarize don't need any kind of plagiarism scanner, simply because everyone (whether he's a professional writer or a student) knows whether the words he's writing come directly from his own mind or from some source. Very experienced writers who have written about various topics many times could accidentally write something very similar to the way they might have expressed a similar idea previously; but nobody needs an online scanner for that: you just do a quick search on your own computer for old projects by topic keywords to make sure that you haven't accidentally written anything much too similar to something you've written before.

Students sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding that paraphrasing or completely rewriting ideas found in source material is still plagiarism if it (meaning the idea, not the wording) isn't properly cited; but scanners can't help them with that at all, simply because they only recognize identical words and phrases, not the conceptual meaning of those words. Incidentally, they don't recognize contextual meaning, either; and they'll frequently incorrectly "flag" combinations of words identified in material that has absolutely nothing to do with the scanned project. For example, you could write the words "the merciless invasion continued for days" discussing the progress of a virus or other pathogen in a Nursing project about disease and find those words "flagged" because someone once used the exact same combination of words discussing the progress of the Nazis in WW2 Europe.

There is no "current issue" because this thread was posted and last responded to almost a decade ago. Would you mind my asking why you continue to revive all of these ancient, long-forgotten, and buried threads?

I'm pretty sure the OP has managed to get past this considering it happened 8 years ago.

Agreed. "Awareness" of the risk should just motivate prospective customers to do their due diligence to figure out which providers are trustworthy and reliable and which providers aren't. Distinguishing them and identifying legitimate providers really shouldn't be all that difficult, especially with this forum and its search function as resources. (When using the search function here, always change the default "titles" to "messages" to avoid having your search limited to threads with your search term actually in the title of the thread.)

I'd agree that an ESL writer whose work is not comparable to that of a good NES writer is knowingly participating in a fraudulent operation. However, as I suggested in a related thread, a writer who merely provides good work that satisfies customers is doing nothing wrong by working for an organization whose principal fraud is that they don't provide work of that quality more often. Chances are that particular writer's customers are the only ones not having any fraud perpetrated against them, regardless of the false advertising that may have convinced them to use the company in the first place. By the strictest definition, some of the most reputable US companies are equally "fraudulent" (even if many of their customers are satisfied), because they advertise that all of their writers hold advanced degrees and that they don't hire any ESL writers(neither of which is true) and because they know full well and with 100% certainty that the vast majority (if not all) of their customers are taking the model papers that they sell and submitting them for academic credit. Their TOS "prohibiting" their customers from doing so are nothing more than an attempt to create "plausible deniability" that won't help them even slightly if a DA or AG of any one of those states with applicable criminal statutes ever decides that it's worth the trouble and expense to start going after academic essay companies for providing a product that they knew or should have known was purchased for the purpose of submitting it for academic credit (which is the standard of criminal culpability typically defined by those statutes). I'm neither defending nor criticizing the practice, just suggesting that those whose hands are quite dirty, themselves, shouldn't be pointing their dirty fingers at others whose hands might be somewhat dirtier or just covered in a different type of dirt.

It's true that UK academic standards are higher than US standards; but I don't think that has anything to do with the price difference. A lot of things are more expensive in the UK, including rent, public & private transportation, energy, and dining out.

Agreed. The people running the company and/or those who are directly involved in perpetuating those lies are the only crooks. A writer who's simply writing and delivering projects that actually satisfy customers isn't doing anything wrong. By the contrary analysis, every employee at Wells Fargo was a criminal (including every secretary and janitor) when the bank was determined to have engaged in large-scale fraud perpetrated by its executives.

Practically every essay-company writer simultaneously tries to build up a private clientele, precisely because we can charge whatever rate the market currently bears without splitting any of it with a company. Obviously, maintaining your own private clientele means you'll be handling all of the emails and customer-service functions by yourself; so it would be completely nonsensical to bother doing all that just to charge the same as you'd earn through a company (roughly half what the legit essay companies charge their customers) for the exact same project, especially when it's from the exact same writer. If anything, we're more likely to go out of our way for private clients and we care much more about our personal reputations than we do (even) about the reputations of any companies for whom we might work.

From the customer's point of view, there's either no difference or the slight advantage of more direct contact with (often) the exact same writer. The only people who have ever suggested otherwise on this forum were (undisclosed) essay-company employees and others with (undisclosed) "financial interests" in various essay companies. From the writer's point of view, it means a lot more time spent on emails; but it's well worth it. None of that is to suggest that there's anything "wrong" with essay companies taking their agreed-upon cut from work that writers only get through them, because that's their agreement. It's just better for writers anytime clients come to us directly and, especially when you're dealing with a well-known writer who's been using the same ID here for more than a decade, there's certainly no disadvantage to clients.

In my experience, there typically isn't really any "hierarchy" of writing talent at essay companies, although the talent level and experience does vary tremendously from writer to writer. Generally, every order simply gets posted onto one assignment board by the automatic system; and any writer with an account can take it, or any other order, on a first-come/first-served basis. The people who run the essay companies usually know who their best writers are and will sometimes ask them to take specific orders with a payout bonus, such as where those orders are for their own friends or family members, or for customers who contact them asking for help finding the right writer. Sometimes we accept those projects and other times we don't.

At one essay company whose owner recruited me directly from here in 2009 or 2010, writers were assigned various designations (such as "Silver," "Gold," and "Platinum"); but I believe those designations only determined the payout rate rather than restricting which projects were available to them. I don't really know because I was immediately assigned their highest level.

Since this 8-year-old thread has been resurrected, I'll offer this response:

The short answer to the OP's question is that they're so disappointing simply because their entire "business model" is based on ripping off new customers and on the assumption that their advertising and SEO will always generate enough new, first-time/last-time customers to sustain their business. They're rip-off artists and no different from rip-off artists in myriad other industries. They're doing the same thing in the cyber realm as rip-off home contractors who take payments from homeowners to repair their homes, disappear with their money, and then incorporate as a new contracting company as soon as a few ripped-off customers start pursuing complaints and claims against them. The major difference in this industry is that many of them operate from abroad where they're relatively safe from the reach of US laws.

Since this 7-year-old thread has been resurrected, I'll ask the following rhetorical question: What would the OP consider appropriate if it were the writer who said the following?:

"I had a customer pay me for a dissertation due in December and I accepted payment in full. Due to some fate, I was unable to complete the project. What I wanted was for the customer to wait until March when I'll have a chance to write it. Now, the customer is threatening me with going public."

I'll answer my own question: You'd think the writer was insane and you'd give him the choice between returning your money immediately or being publicly exposed for his actions.

I don't think there's any way to cancel a transaction paid for by debit card.


Correct. However, the OP never indicated the due date requested. It's not unheard of for customers to order a 100-pg dissertation with a 1-week deadline. That kind of thing does require the writer to start immediately, in which case, the company (or writer) has the right to retain pro-rata payment for whatever work has already been done before the cancellation request. Otherwise, in normal situations with a long-term dissertation-appropriate deadline, there's no excuse for not allowing the refund. When I was writing for essay companies, I'd occasionally get system notices from the company that a project on my calendar had been cancelled; but if it was a long project and/or a short deadline, I'd get an email from admin first, asking me whether I'd started the project.

As mentioned above, once you have enough experience with a writer to know that deadlines can be a problem, it's up to you to decide about continuing to use someone unreliable. You shouldn't have shared your actual deadline, because it's obvious this writer ignored your requested deadline and considered your final deadline to be his deadline, too. You could also have agreed in advance that late delivery would be compensated by a partial refund equivalent to 1 paid page per day, or something similar to incentivize timely delivery. After previous experience with missed deadlines, you could even have specified and agreed in advance that failure to meet your deadline would trigger a full refund request on your part; and you could have left yourself enough of a cushion to have someone else take over the project in time for your actual deadline. But what you shouldn't have done was divulge your real deadline without any conversation or agreement about the consequences of another missed deadline with a writer who already missed some of your prior deadlines.


The time to do your due diligence about whether or not a writer is being honest with you about basic information such as his location is before you decide to trust him with your money, not afterwards when he misses (another) deadline and you start wasting your time frantically scrambling to find out who and where he is.

Correct. We advertisers who get clients from this forum also have to consider our reputations here at all times. Those of us who have been active here for more than a decade under the same ID could never have done so without satisfying our clients with the quality and reliability of our work on a consistent basis.

I'd suggest that substantive posts on this forum serve the exact same purpose as a blog, in that respect, especially by writers who have been contributing here consistently for more than a decade under the same ID.

True, but once in a while, they do. The poster, notsotypicalblonde, above was actually a genuine student who was one of them. I believe she stopped using me after a few projects because she found someone cheaper, and she also left positive feedback (and a contact email that was removed by the moderators) for that other writer, as well, before that writer (I believe) ended up letting her down subsequently, about which she also posted elsewhere on this forum. (It's also possible that the writer who let her down was the first writer she tried before me and not the person she used afterwards, but I don't know.)

https://essayscam.org/forum/es/legitimate-writing-services-2832/#msg67258
https://essayscam.org/forum/es/essayservices-dissertation-help-needed-4434/#msg66177

I suspect that the OP just works for an essay company that decided to try to use that post as a way of slyly "competing" against other companies and writers here who happen to use the term "model essays" in their websites or advertising, by employing the brilliant strategy of implying that all of their "model papers" are cut-and-paste jobs. Those of us who use that term do so simply to indicate what the intended and expected use of our work is and not to distinguish "model papers" from "original writing" in any other respect. To any legitimate service provider, those terms are completely synonymous and (both) consist of all-original work without anything copied or otherwise plagiarized.

[Thanks to the moderators for reopening this thread and for including my first post that I originally started as a new thread to respond to this OP's nonsense suggestion after this thread was closed to responses.]

I just want to make sure that nobody confuses the reference to a freelance writer in Post #6 with me because I was not the "FREELANCE WRITER" referred to in that post or anywhere else in this thread. All of us independent writers are freelance writers. Sometimes, even a well-chosen S/N can have its drawbacks.

If you're talking about providers on this forum, some of the information you might want to consider might be the length of time a provider has been participating on this forum using the same ID and what that provider's customers and legitimate competitors have said about him or her.

If you mean more generally, the first step might be to consider whether or not the website copy sounds like English you'd want in your project, irrespective of how flashy or functional that website appears to be. Another consideration might be whether or not the website's claims and guarantees sound realistic or entirely promotional in their substance and tone. In that regard, understand that there's no such thing as "unlimited free revisions" in this industry and that there's no such thing as any essay company that hires "only" holders of master and/or doctorate degrees. Not that one necessarily needs advanced degrees to do this work well; but those types of claims by an essay company should be considered a red flag of dishonesty.

Even an "authentic" company (meaning one that actually provides original writing for the projects it provides) employs many writers whose experience, talents, and abilities vary quite widely from one another. There are also independent writers who are "authentic" but who might sometimes overestimate their abilities, even in good faith. So, ultimately, you'll always need to test out any company and any writer with short projects first; and in the case of companies, understand that your experience with any one of its writers means nothing, necessarily, about any of its other writers.

If you're in the US, your best bet is to stick with a US-based provider. If you're in the UK, you're probably better off sticking with a UK-based provider unless you manage to find a very good US-based provider with plenty of UK-project experience who's capable of writing UK English. Even the very best of us are probably cheaper than comparably-good UK companies, especially when you include the taxes on your end. However, there are companies that claim to be US and/or UK-based that are really located in Eastern Europe or in Third-World countries; so never assume that you can necessarily rely on the name of any company or on what its website says about its location without doing some basic background research first.

Hello, Pot...Meet Kettle.

I don't know why the thread started by "ultimatewriter" was closed before anybody responded to it; but "ultimatewriter" should just speak for himself instead of presuming to speak for any other writers. When I provide a model paper, it is always an entirely original piece of writing. It is intended for the customer to use as a model, but as far as the work that I provide is concerned, there is absolutely no difference between a model paper and an original piece of writing. What the customer chooses to do with it is the customer's business and nothing that I have any way of controlling. I'm pretty sure that nobody needs to pay a writer just to copy and paste anything into standard essay formats, because a simple Google search provides countless examples of how to format an academic project of any type and nobody needs to pay anybody just to copy and paste anything into one of those formats instead of just doing that himself. My model papers are intended to help students learn how to write, not learn how to copy and paste.

About a decade ago, some researchers published their evidence demonstrating that plagiarism was pretty rampant, even at the highest level: namely, within peer-reviewed scientific journals. The research identified many instances of the exact same isolated mistakes in listed references that couldn't possibly be explained by coincidence. Their conclusion was that some ridiculous percentage of cited sources had simply been copied and pasted from other published journal articles, which probably meant that the authors never even read those sources but simply found them and copied them from other journals. IMO, that's a lot more serious a problem than any kind of student plagiarism just for a grade in school.


Only because you're discussing it now, I believe you mean compose, not "comprise." I've never mentioned this before because we weren't discussing grammar pet peeves, but I've also noticed that you have a fairly regular habit of making the effort to specify the singular "him/her" before subsequently using "they" or "their" in the same sentence, as in this sentence, here:


in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/es/use-one-paper-writing-companies-help-5257/
IMO, and only because you're discussing grammar pet peeves, there are other preferable ways of implementing gender-neutrality that don't involve mixing singular and plural personal pronouns in the same sentence.

There are very few 3-pg projects that I couldn't squeeze in overnight unless I'm already under pressure to meet another deadline. However, it's inconvenient and professors don't often assign projects due the next day; so definitely expect to pay a premium for my inconvenience, if that just means writing your rush project instead of relaxing in front of the TV if that's what had planned for the rest of that evening. As a company writer who was simultaneously building a private clientele, I couldn't even count the number of times that I grabbed a rush 3-pg project due the next day(or several) while I was already working late that night. What's really annoying is when someone emails me with "URGENT" in the subject field and asks me for a difficult 10-pg project due in a few hours as though it's ever appropriate to procrastinate that much and expect me to treat that as some kind of "emergency" that isn't totally self-created and unnecessary.

On the broader topic of not getting scammed, there's nothing you can to "guarantee" it if it's your first project with any writer or company. All you can do is minimize your potential risk by ordering only a short project first, before trusting that person or company with a longer project. Generally, there are legit writer and scam writers: the former will provide your project as promised and the latter won't. There probably aren't really any writers (or companies) whose scam involves first providing a high-quality original project just to suck you into ordering a much longer project a few weeks or months later and then not providing the larger project.

IMO, it's neither helpful nor relevant to the conversation to mention people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, because 99.9% of people considering college don't share their incredible intellect and unique talents. For the vast majority of people without a very unique set of skills and talent, a college degree is still a necessity for a halfway decent job. The fact that many college graduates aren't using their degrees and are having trouble finding any work that pays more than minimum wage actually means that without a degree, it is now, unfortunately, even harder to get one of those jobs, simply because so many candidates for them have college degrees.

My advice would be that it's much more important than it used to be to attend college with a purpose, because the era of floating through college and picking some major just for a degree under the assumption that having any college degree will be an advantage in the job market are definitely over. If that's how you approach college, you might actually be better off entering the fulltime work force at 18, instead, so that if you're halfway competent and responsible, you'll have enough work experience to move up a bit by the time you'd have floated through four years of college with some major you picked as a sophomore just to make the deadline for selecting a major. Nowadays, you really should have some idea of what fields you hope (realistically) to enter before you even get to college and you need to pick a school whose degree means something in that particular field. Pick a major in college with a specific vocational goal or pick one with the aim of continuing to graduate school in that field, because if you just major in Sociology or Psychology with no intention of continuing to grad school, you better also work on your coffee-pouring technique while you're in college.

I respectfully disagree. IMO, it's easier for company reps to sell lousy services in a phone conversation than it is for them to compose a grammatically-correct (let alone stellar) email, at least one that isn't obviously just a pre-written email with the customer's first name inserted into the opening sentence and elsewhere.

I don't know anything about that company, either, except for similar conclusions that I'd draw from reviewing their web copy. I'd hate to be lumped into the same group with them just because we are all paid advertisers here.

Maybe, for inexperienced new writers. However, clients don't really care about helping new writers find work; they just want the best writing they can possibly find. This isn't like having surgery in a teaching hospital where you consent to have surgeons in training possibly perform their very first surgical procedure on you. If a new writer is any good, he should be able to find some work at an essay company by submitting a resume and some writing samples, the same way I did for the first time 15 or 16 years ago, and get 500 or 1,000 or more projects under his belt before expecting to work for the better companies. If I were a client, I'd also be looking for the most experienced writer I could find, rather than someone just starting out in this business.