I don't have first-hand knowledge of either of these companies, but remember when you hire a company only about half of your money actually goes to the writer. You're better off finding an independent writer who will charge less and probably produce higher quality work because they actually get the full price of the paper.

You might want to actually name the company.

While most companies and writers rightly require up-front payment for work, this is all but certainly a scam. Not only does their customer service representative clearly not know what they're doing (the VAT number is supposed to be posted on the website of any UK company and is readily available to anyone seeking it out and any employee ought to know this, especially in this industry), but the Pakistan/India connection and lack of VAT number makes it clear that this company is pretending to operate as a UK company when they are nothing of teh kind.

Steer clear of these scammers.

...such as yourself?

In my experience, most US firms do NOT hire Pakistani writers at all. Many uneducated foreign writers seem to think that their quality is up to the same standards as highly qualified native writers when this simply isn't the case.

I don't think it's a crappy job--set your own hours, make a nice living, work in your pajamas, etc. Why did you do it if you hated it, and why would you ever take work you felt you were being underpaid for?

I think stu4 is a nothing but a scammer and michael is his little sycophant.

You're still focusing on the email address and haven't even addressed my point.

If you make a payment to an account with a reputable service that has been certified or "verified" as belonging to someone with the legal name they've given you, in a country within the reach of law, then you have the ability to contact the payment processor and get a refund if you become the victim of fraud. Accounts that are so verified cannot simply be closed and abandoned, as they are tied to bank accounts and often to legal addresses as well as legal names.

Again, if you use a reputable company to send a payment and make sure the account you're sending money to is certified or verified, the type of scam you're suggesting wouldn't work.

Most decent writers in this industry make at least $20 per page, and usually more. You can certainly find writers for $10 per page, but you get what you pay for.

We've been through this before. The email address a writer uses has nothing to do with tracing their location. The payment account they use does. Anyone can create a gmail or other email account, but creating a certified payment account as an individual from a particular country is harder to do fraudulently and provides customers the ability to get refunds from the payment servicer if they are scammed.

Having a website means absolutely nothing--anyone can create a website with a .com, .co.uk, or other top-level domain ending. Having a country-specific verified payment account is the only thing that provides any sort of safety.

Is anyone else tired of hearing stu4 provide instructions to others--journalists, writers, business owners, etc--when it's obvious to everyone that he is nothing but a poorly educated scammer?

You're better off finding an independent writer that you can actually check out completely before sending them any money.

They [i]did[i] scam him. That seems to be the precise point of his post.

Facts are not opinions. Either companies behave as you suggest or they don't. You've made the claim; can you provide any proof?

That is not a fact, but rather is precisely the point of contention.


I strongly disagree.

You're making rather large claims, but I still disagree. Most large corporations due have repeated ethical violations, to be sure, but they also limit their transgressions far more than you're implying. I'm not saying this makes them "good," but they certainly don't solely look at their bottom line.

The difference is there is no "ought to be writing" onus in the patent scenario. People that write their own patent documents without the expertise are likely to have them rejected, and hiring professionals to do it instead is a common and entirely open practice. It's the same as having an attorney draw up incorporation papers--it isn't expected that you drew them up yourself and the attorney's name is almost always prominently displayed, sometimes by law.

While some businesses might operate this way, many do not. Most companies limit their earnings by behaving ethically, though the degree and direction of the trade-off varies considerably.

Having a patent lawyer put together the patent documents/write the description is entirely different from a customer hiring someone to write academic work for them.

I'm having trouble making your three points add up to "business means being heartless," but if that's what you meant then it has even less to do with the subject at hand.

I disagree with you, as well. Business is about making money, but it is also about treating people correctly. Treating people in a proper manner also tends to be a good business move.

All of your points can essentially be summed up as, "Good writers/companies still make mistakes sometimes." This is absolutely true, but has nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

She sold the work to be turned in by a high school student and was surprised and upset to find out that her client was a high school student who also read the work aloud?

If you call yourself a writer, you ought to.


Given that some people were using the two words interchangeably, I'm not sure it's so obvious to everyone. The fact that this discussion is happening is evidence that most people don't consider it "amoral" at all, and no one has actually supported an argument that the issue is amoral. You advanced the notion without any real explanation, and the rest of discussion has been about the morality of the issue--mostly why it is justifiable. I, too, think it is justifiable, but anyone that morally justifies the industry is also clearly insisting that it is not an amoral issue at all.

If you want an Indian company that is outside legal reach, trust SolveMyAssignment.

I don't think anyone has a bias against people that don't speak English as a first language. There's a "bias" against people who aren't actually fully fluent in the language insisting that they're as good as top native writers and lying to customers about where they're from.

No, there is not that risk, SpamMyAssignment. Turnitin's student service is designed as a means fo checking for plagiarism without storing the paper, though I don't really understand why this service exists. Accidental plagiarism doesn't really happen all that often, so checking work that you yourself have completed for plagiarism shouldn't need to happen...

...we all know that "amoral" and "immoral" are two very different things, right?

*public transportation

Hear, hear!

Topic for Presentation: Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century- Manifestations, Implications and Recommendations for Higher Education Faculty

Slide I: Introduction- Technology and Dishonesty: The Changing Nature of Academic Integrity in Higher Education

Slide II: Defining Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: Challenges and Implications

Slide III: Framing Academic Integrity within the Context of Society- Moral Dissolution and Social Responsibility

Slide IV: Framing Academic Integrity within the Context of a Higher Learning Institution: Values, Ethics, and Student Responsibility

Slide V: Academic Dishonesty: Common, Technology-Supported Manifestations birthed from the World Wide Web and Personal, "Smart" Devices

Slide VI: Cheating, Fabrication, and Plagiarism: Different Meanings and Different Implications for the Classroom Environment

Slide VII: Student Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty and Academic Integrity: Empirical Evidence

Slide VIII: Faculty Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty and Academic Integrity: Empirical Evidence

Slide IX: Institutional Policies and Academic Dishonesty and Academic Integrity: Empirical Evidence

Slide X: Causation of Academic Dishonesty in the Twenty-First Century: Unprecedented Personal and Environmental Factors

Slide XI: Influence I- Personal Factors: Low Self-Control, Low Self-Esteem, and the Lure of the Grade

Slide XII: Influence II- Personal Factors: Concern over Academic Standing and Perceived Gains: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

Slide XIII: Influence III- Social and Environmental Factors: Isolation, Alienation, and Peer Pressure

Slide XIV: Underreporting of Academic Integrity Violations by Faculty Members- Why Higher Education Faculty Members Fail to Pursue Legal Channels

Slide XV: Proposing Solutions to Academic Dishonesty- Recommendations for Institutions and Faculty Members

Slide XVI: Solution I- Honor Codes, Student Interventions, and Peer-Reporting

Slide XVII: Solution II- Enhancing Communications between Students, Faculty, Parents, Communities, and Institutions

Slide XVIII: Solution III: Mutually Birthed Policies- Working Together to Establish and Enforce University Policies

Slide XIX: Solution IV: The Classroom Community- Encouraging Academic Integrity within the Microcosm of the Higher Education Classroom

Slide XX: Conclusions: The Charge of Higher Learning Faculty Members in the Post-Enron Age

That there are frauds from Africa is unquestionable. That all Africans are frauds does not logically follow.

Yes.

Again, I think everything you list is important. I guess it's about the same as a full discussion of the project taking place through emails.

Your customers ought to be able to tell from your emails whether or not you can write, and a full discussion of project details should always take place before any payment is made, especially when working directly with a writer.

I don't think an abstract-style paragraph is really appropriate, though, as you shouldn't be able to so readily lay out the scope of most papers; research is needed, and papers often take shape as they come together.

I would hate to be tied to a preliminary sketch I made without fully engaging in a specific project, and I would hate to give the customer a false sense of what to expect.

The most important things for a customer to take into account are the service the writer or company uses to collect payments and the country of the writer's account with said payment service.

Fraud protection services are not as straightforward as would be hoped, but there are decent payment options that actually protect payments for services, and this is the only way customers can ensure they can get their money back if they don't receive the service they paid for.

Is it time for Racist Rant, Round 2 already?

This isn't necessarily true. Many companies retain the copyright to the work produced, and it says so in the purchase agreement.


This is an entirely different scenario. It's like trying to compare hired academic writing to ghostwriting.

If the company is hiring writers that can't do the work the company is selling, then the company is entirely at fault. Good companies don't regularly hire bad writers, and they will release these writers and refund/rewrite subpar work when it is discovered.

If she wrote it to someone else's specifications and got paid for it, I don't think she has a reason to be upset. A blurb I wrote about an art exhibit, which I wrote under my own name and not as a piece of paid work, once ended up in a newspaper with someone else's name on it, and that got me pretty miffed. This doesn't sound like the same situation, though.

"How Your Work Gets Evaluated

Your work generally is reviewed by another worker, and may be approved, Reviewer Corrected or rejected. If your work is approved, you will be paid the full amount + the stated bonus amount. If your work is Reviewer Corrected and approved, you will be paid the full amount, however, the bonus will go to your peer reviewer.

When Your Work Is Rejected

For writing and editing projects, if your work is rejected and you meet certain criteria, you will have the opportunity to Self-Correct your work and earn the majority of your original pay. To learn more about Self-Corrections, please see the Correction Overview page."

This incentivizes "peer reviewers" to find problems with work completed (they get the bonus pay for "correcting" initial work), and unless the amount the customer pays is reduced in a "Self-Correct" scenario it incentivizes the company/the peer reviewer to reject work as much as possible, because they will pocket the difference between the "original pay" and the reduced pay to the writer. This sounds just like the fine schemes in place at many questionable companies.

Yes, we are on very different sides of the fence. Let me know the next time you want some Shakespeare taken off your hand, and I'd be happy to pass along a PowerPoint presentation. They drive me crazy.

Again, how?


You flatter yourself. I believe I have mentioned you once in a post that was not a direct response to you, and the only reason I'm talking to you now is because you directly addressed me.


I'm not. I brought it up once as an indicator of the lowest level of discourse I've seen on this forum, and you keep running back to it.

I have also read many works by most of the authors you've listed (never could push myself through Miller--just not a fan) and found much of this reading quite enjoyable. I've also read Harry Potter and know what the Hunger Games is about, and if you're doling out advice on non-violent reading I would recommend avoiding these two series, as well.