I've told this story in greater detail before, but I once had a client who used me for all of her projects for 3 or 4 years, always paying in advance. When she asked me for a pair of projects for which she could only pay after she got her next paycheck, I didn't refuse, mainly because of how long she'd been a loyal client. Instead of paying me a week or two later as promised, she sent me a long apologetic email explaining how bad her financial situation had become and promising to pay me "as soon as possible." It turned out one of those projects was her very last project before graduation and the other was a statement supporting her child custody court battle against her ex-husband. Not only did she never pay me for either of those two last projects, but she also had the nerve to contact me again about a year later asking me for a law-enforcement job-application essay emphasizing ethics and integrity and never responded when I reminded her that she'd never made good on her promise to pay me for the last two projects I'd provided a year earlier. That's why I've never agreed again to "help out" anybody asking me to schedule (much less work on) any project before it's paid in full, regardless of how long someone's been a client or how many previous projects I've provided. I reference that particular experience when I explain why nobody should ever take offense at that.

One difference between freelance writers and companies not well accounted for in the analysis above is that, unlike companies, the ordering process with freelance writers isn't automatic. Conscientious freelance writers don't accept projects that they can't complete at a high level in the first place, so the client knows that's the case as soon as the writer declines the project or refers it to another provider. At most writing companies, the order goes up automatically on the assignment board with no human input. Some of those orders get taken by writers quickly, whereas others may not; some of the more difficult projects may linger long enough that their requested due dates come and go without the order ever having been taken by any writer. The only thing that happens to those orders is that the due date changes to another color to indicate that it's already overdue. The client only gets notified after the fact that the order was never actually completed and receives a refund. Conversely, when customers place orders with freelance writers directly, they know the project is scheduled and will be written as soon as it's paid.

The suggestion that "sloppy" work from bad writing-company writers that needs to be fixed by their "better" writers doesn't apply either, if the freelance writer with whom you're dealing happens to have been one of the very best writers at the best essay company, according to the essay company itself. If you're dealing with one of the top freelance writers, the writer isn't going to bail on the project or produce "sloppy" work that needs to fixed by someone "better"; and once you pay for the order, you know it's been scheduled for completion and delivery by your due date. At essay companies, a writer still has to choose to accept that order, and it could be taken by one of the "better" writers or by one of the "sloppy" writers whose work will have to be fixed later by a better writer.

[Note: The analysis presented above presumes that the client is dealing with legitimate experienced professional freelance writers and legitimate essay companies; it does not apply to any situation in which you don't yet know whether you're dealing with legit providers in the first place.]

Just notify the client that you're going to post the essay as a free essay in the appropriate section of this forum and that any plagiarism scan will lead right here, leaving the professor with no doubt about the essay's actual authorship. By far, the best approach is simply never start work on any project (much less deliver it) before it's paid in full. Here's just one very recent example of why that's the case:

Just last week, I did two very difficult identical OSCOLA-style UK Law projects (different choice of topic question for two friends). Both requested paid revisions for me to make changes to incorporate their after-the-fact editorial requests and I delivered both revisions after payment. Then, one of them requested another revision to cut it down from 3,500 words to < 3,300 words, with too little time before his submission deadline for me to explain that cutting it down is another paid edit because his original instructions never specified that the 3,000-word project had any hard maximum word count. (We'd also had email exchanges in the interim in which I'd specifically referred to a 3,500-word maximum because that's what his friend had indicated and the two projects were identical except for choice of topic.) Even though it wasn't an owed fix, I tried to do the right thing for him and just went ahead and cut it down immediately and turned around that second revision in time for him to make his deadline and I explained in the email with the final file why it would have to be a charged fix because he'd wasted my time unnecessarily by not indicating any hard maximum word count in his specs or in response to my email referencing a 3,500-word maximum length, and I asked him to submit that nominal payment after the fact. Had I just responded with the explanation about why it would have to be a paid fix and waited for payment before doing it for him, he'd have missed his deadline.

Take a wild guess whether or not he ever responded or issued that payment after receiving his rush edit in time for his deadline.

Why would you find this so shocking? It makes perfect sense. It's apparently much easier to just redirect web traffic from legitimate providers than it is for them to convince customers to order from them voluntarily and with full knowledge of who they are.

I don't refuse to send them a sample of my previous work if they just want to see my writing style, but I try to explain to them that a sample is worthless unless or until you're already confident that you're dealing with a legitimate provider and not a scammer in the first place. Scammers will either just send "samples" that they found online or even pay a legit writer or company to write that first page for them. More often than not, prospective clients asking to see a sample do so as part of trying to determine whether or not a new writer is legit, which means it's useless to them. Ironically, it always seems to be the same clients asking to see samples who also want assurance that their projects won't ever be used as samples. If they have enough time -- and usually, they don't, because they wait until the last minute to find a writer -- they can pay me to write the first page (or the first few pages) before they decide to order the whole project, but an unpaid custom sample is out of the question and something they're never going to get, except (maybe) from a brand new writer struggling desperately for work and willing to risk totally wasting his time and effort.

On a fairly regular basis, they contact me unsolicited asking to "work with" me and they send me their writing samples. Other times, I get new clients asking me to "fix" or rewrite the essays they got much cheaper from them. From what I've seen of their writing, even the ones whose intentions are honest simply can't write any better than the clients to whom they hope to sell their work. Sure, their pages of text and reference lists are formatted correctly and they insert most of their in-text citations in the right places, but that's about it. Their work only looks acceptable as an academic essay before you actually read what they've written. Many of their sentences either say absolutely nothing or almost nothing substantive, or they repeat in only slightly different words exactly what preceding sentences have just said, or they're all just complete non-sequiturs, and their paragraphs end with totally unsupported announced "conclusions" that are nothing more than restatements of the premise in their introductory sentences. Those essays are the intellectual equivalent of a "sandwich" consisting of two slices of bread with nothing in the middle. In between their meaningless sentences, they'll cram in some simplistic quotes from sources that are no more logically related to the supposed paragraph topic than their sentences are logically related to one another. And, as I said, that's the ones whose intentions are honest in that they're really trying their best to write something without plagiarizing. That doesn't mean they're scammers, especially if they disclose their ESL status and their location; but if someone can only write at the level of the average American 9th Grade student, there's just not going to be very much demand for his work, except maybe from the parents of 6th Grade students who do occasionally order work for their kids.

By far, the best strategy for building a clientele is to understand that it's a long-term prospect and that it depends mostly on retaining as close to 100% of your clients' future business as possible after their first projects. Very few clients only need a single project; most of them are looking for a long-term association with a reliable writer to help them with all of their written projects until they receive their degrees. Once you have a stable base of a few dozen regular clients, you only need to replace them at roughly the same rate that you lose them to graduation to maintain a full workload. It's not a business that requires a constant inflow of brand new clients unless your work isn't good enough to retain almost every client you ever get for many months or several years after they receive your first work.

At the two far ends of the spectrum (requests to cancel far in advance and requests to cancel very close to deadline and/or after work has already begun) are the easiest issues: it's fair to expect to cancel on the former and it's unfair to expect to cancel on the latter. The tricky situations are when someone places an order a month or more in advance and then asks to cancel a week or several days before deadline. While we might not have yet actually begun work on it, we might already have turned down another project with that would have been a conflicting deadline based on the expectation of having to do that first project.

Advertisement is just that: advertisement. The main purpose of advertisement is that it lets advertisers increase awareness of their services. As a consumer, you should consider any advertisement to be just the start of your research to identify the right service provider for you, not the end of that effort.

Correct. While it's true that the customer services reps aren't necessarily writers, ordinarily, companies pay one or more of their best writers to come up with the text used on their websites. So, anytime the quality of the website text is atrocious, error-ridden ESL gibberish, you can assume that's the highest level of writing quality the company is capable of providing on any project you order from them and that most of the projects they provide won't even meet that "standard."

I'm not saying this to insult you purposely, but if you can't even compose grammatically-correct forum posts consisting of one or two short sentences, then you can't possibly have a realistic hope of writing for a living, at least not in English. I can't tell from your posts whether English is even your first language. If it isn't, you just have to understand that your English needs to improve substantially before thinking about writing in English for a living; if it is, then you have a lot of work to do just to learn how to write before you can think realistically about writing for a living (even for ESL clients). If you think I'm wrong about that, just type out one short paragraph of about 100 words right here on any topic of your choice to demonstrate how good a writer you are.

I charge my customers approximately the same as the essay companies for which I did the most work charges them, not "2-3 times more."

Again, what essay companies paid me and what I charge customers privately for my work have nothing whatsoever to do with one another or with the customer. Either way, the customer receives an essay written by me for the same price. The main difference is simply that I've eliminated the middleman and don't have to share the proceeds of my hard work with any company. As I've explained previously, that also allows me to accept many projects with longer deadlines that I'd have never even considered taking from the essay company because they just weren't worth my time for the payout offered by the companies, even when the customers specifically "requested" me as their writer.

There's nothing wrong with that arrangement for writers who must rely on companies for work, but most experienced writers who write for companies aspire to build their own clientele for that most obvious of reasons, and they don't charge their private customers only what their previous essay companies paid them, because they're not insane.

Negative, again:


I've never claimed, even once, that "companies do nothing but increase the price." I've said that working freelance is better for writers, because there's no middleman involved. I've also argued that once they identify a good honest writer, customers are definitely better off working with that writer than working with an essay company. However, I believe I've never had to make that argument here at all except as a response to threads and posts from undisclosed principals and employees of essay companies who argue the contrary position, first, in their efforts to steer all prospective customers away from freelancers and toward essay companies. My related comments outside of that context usually refer in a very unbiased way to "legit companies and legit freelance writers."


As any of my customers can attest, I respond to their emails 24/7 and almost instantaneously unless I'm sleeping. The reality of customer service (whether by "live chat" or "phone support" or "usable" websites), is that at essay companies, customer support is just another layer in between customers and their writers. If the writer is sleeping or otherwise unavailable, the only "support" the company provides is responding to assure the customer that the message has been relayed to the writer and that the writer will respond ASAP. Company reps know no more than their customers about project status or about any issues with their projects until the writer reads emails and responds. Some of their writers work full time from their homes as I do and respond very promptly; but others only do this part time and might be as unavailable to the company as they are to the customer for days, until they decide to check their emails and respond. In fact, the main function of essay-company customer service reps is to prevent customers and writers from communicating directly. The reality is that essay companies expressly prohibit any direct contact between writers and customers and they make sure that their messaging systems flag any contact information (even warning writers that attempting to do share it with customers will result in termination), precisely because they understand that many of their own customers would prefer to bypass the company and work with writers directly. If that weren't the case, essay companies could simply allow writers and customers to email one another directly.


For years, I operated just fine using only my email address and without any website whatsoever. The only reason that I had to create a website in 2009 was that you and other undisclosed essay-company principals and employees repeatedly promoted the notion that no writer without a websites should be trusted. At that time, I suggested to the most vocal of you that she knew exactly who some of us freelance writers posting here were, and that she should have at least phrased her warnings about doing business with freelance writers more narrowly to avoid hitting us with shrapnel by suggesting that no writer operating without a website should ever be trusted. I believe that in response, that particular undisclosed company "affiliated" poster said it wasn't her "responsibility" to do that and that's when (and why) I created a website.

That's a nice little tag-team propaganda campaign on behalf of essay companies: one of you warns customers never to do business with any writer who doesn't have a website, and when a writer who wrote thousands of essays for her company finally creates a website out of the necessity that she created with those warnings, an undisclosed employee of another essay company accuses that same writer of "pretending" to be a freelance writer because he created that website. I'm not "pretending" to be anything; I'm a freelance writer who had no choice but to create a website in response to the attempts by essay-company principals and employees here to steer all clients their way by deliberately frightening prospective clients away from all freelance writers, even from freelance writers they know full well have provided their own companies with thousands of high-quality projects for many years before going solo.

Negative. The going market rate that clients pay for our work is set by the objective value of the product to customers; it's not set by the percentage of the price to customers that essay companies choose to pay out to their writers. More generally, I wish you didn't (still) have to instigate an argument pitting legit freelancers against legit essay companies in almost every conversation, even where nobody has said anything critical of your essay company or of any essay company.

I wasn't at all suggesting that there's anything "wrong" with essay companies keeping their percentage of incoming payments. Their writers know in advance exactly what their payout will be for their projects and that the company is in business to generate a profit by selling their writers' work for more than they pay out to their writers for that work. That's obvious; but it should be equally obvious that writers always prefer working for their own clients directly anytime they manage to attract direct customers, simply because they don't have to share any of their income with anybody providing middleman functions. That isn't intended as any kind of criticism of essay companies or of their business model; and that's all I meant by the phrase "working for yourself beats working for a company," which is always true from the writer's perspective.

Customers who choose to work directly with freelance writers fully understand that they're going to pay whatever the furnished product is worth (objectively) and that established legit freelance writers are (obviously) going to charge approximately the same price as established legit essay companies charge their customers for the same essay. Customers also understand that writers would have no incentive to even bother working for themselves in the first place and to bother handing all the customer-service functions of working directly with clients (much less spending money on their own websites and advertising) if they're only going to earn the same for any given essay as they'd have earned taking that same project from a company that already handles customer service and all the other overhead expenses of generating and administrating business.

Even that simple analysis doesn't take into account the difference in quality between the work provided by specific freelance writers who have been acknowledged as being among the best of the best company writers and the work provided by whatever writer (usually, out of hundreds of them) chooses to take any order made available to all writers on essay-company assignment boards. As you know full well, there is a tremendous difference in quality between the best and most experienced writers at (even the best) essay companies and the worst and least experienced writers at those same companies.

Sure, essay-company customers can often request specific writers, but if we choose not to take their orders, that's not very helpful. I can tell you that even when I was totally dependent on essay-company orders, I rejected as many requests for my services as I accepted, simply because those orders just weren't worth (to me) what the companies were paying out on them. Typically, this happened when a customer placed a rush order for which I received $20/pg and then followed up by requesting me for another order that only paid out $10/pg because of a longer deadline. As a freelance writer, I rarely decline any project that I'm capable of completing at a high level unless I'm hopelessly overbooked. Frankly, I'm also free to set prices for projects based partly on how much I do or don't need those particular projects at that particular time, depending on how busy I am (or how busy I want to be). Anytime prospective clients question my price, I encourage them to experiment with someone cheaper, and I tell them that they're always perfectly welcome to try me again in the future if they should decide that they're not happy with work they find at a cheaper price. However, even prospective clients who do want to try their luck finding cheaper work first seem to understand that whenever they hire a highly-experienced freelance writer, they're probably not going to be paying any less than they'd be paying a company, especially for the same essay written by that same writer.

@LouisHooper
I don't think anybody needs to be persuaded that working for yourself beats working for a company that keeps a substantial percentage of clients' payments for projects. The most difficult aspect of working for yourself is building up a sufficiently large clientele to do it, and that takes at least several years to do.

I'm hoping that never becomes necessary because I don't even have a smart phone. I carry my wife's old Razr and don't use it for anything except the occasional outgoing phone call from my car. No Internet on it, no email, no message system set up, and nobody even has the #.

When clients have projects that require drafts before the final submissions, I usually explain that after thousands of projects, I no longer need to write any "drafts" and I offer to just provide the final version before the due date of the draft, which they can then use to develop a "draft" without costing them any extra money. Anything shorter than about 10 pages typically gets written in a single work session, so providing a draft usually also means having to spend part of another day on a project that normally takes me only part of one day. I won't refuse to provide an earlier draft and sometimes clients do choose that more expensive option, but I have to charge extra for that, simply because it means that I'll have to spend more time on the project and deliver something sooner than I would if it were just a regular project with a single due date.

This is true, even with respect to the legit American-based companies that own dozens of different websites and take orders from all of their "affiliated" sites. As a company writer, I saw comments in some clients' orders that said things along the lines of "I hope you guys can do a much better job than %$*& company, because the essay they sent me was horrible, so that's why I'm trying you guys this time." Meanwhile, the other company they mentioned was just another of those owned and operated by the same parent company and their newly-placed order was the same one that had been posted on our assignment board a week or two earlier for the exact same stable of writers as their new order.

Over the years I've done more than 100 of those online class forum responses requiring short responses to classmates' arguments, especially for Nursing programs. When I read some of the posts from the other students, I'm amazed at how bad they usually are. Luckily, when they become nurses, their job performance and the quality of care they deliver won't depend on their writing ability. I question the usefulness of these writing assignments because they don't seem to have anything to do with training nurses to be nurses.

About half of those victims probably give up on the industry, but the other half jump right back into the client pool, although maybe after a little more research to find a legit provider than they put into it the first time. I regularly have new clients show me the atrocious essays that they received from the first provider they tried for the same assignment. Not all that infrequently, someone declines to use me for a project after asking for the price, and then ends up paying me more than the original price to do it in a rush a few weeks later after they tried a much cheaper provider first and received something totally unusable.

This is inaccurate. There are some totally legit American essay companies that consolidate many different customer-facing websites into a single parent company and a single assignment board for one stable of writers. They probably set those different companies up for reasons having to do with SEO and advertising rather than for any illegitimate purposes. Regardless of which website the orders come through, the parent company applies the same standards and practices and always supplies the projects ordered by customers.

I'm trying not to say anything that could come across as unnecessarily insulting, but your grammar simply isn't good, and some of the words that you use don't mean what you apparently think they mean in the context that you use them, as evidenced even just in your last response to me. Just as one example, the word "clues" is not synonymous with "tips" or "suggestions" or "points," or with any other word that fits your intended meaning in that sentence. I understand what you're trying to say and why you might think that "clues" is an appropriate word choice, but it just isn't.

You obviously speak English fairly well (and much better than I speak any second language), but you're not (yet) able to compose written sentences in English without several very obvious mistakes in verb tenses and use of articles, among other things, in (almost) every sentence you write, whether in your essays or in your informal forum posts. I assumed that you knew this already, but your follow-up question suggests that, perhaps, you don't, and that you think your writing is much better than it really is. If you really need me to give you more specific examples, I can do that (and so could just about any other adult native speaker of English, whether or not he's a professional writer), but as I said already, I'm genuinely trying not to insult you.

OK?

Why would you leave out the Recommended Services and featured writers here?

Your written English needs a lot of work. You probably know this, so there's no reason to pick apart your grammar and vocabulary choices.

Structurally, you should make sure that every paragraph starts with a specific topic sentence and that the rest of that paragraph directly relates to and develops that topic.

Substantively and logically, most of what you argue about technology applies more (in First-World countries, at least) to technological shifts that already occurred about 50 or 60 years ago (and about 100 years ago, in the case of your comments about electricity) than to your essay topic of the technological revolution of the 21st Century.

I never encountered that system as a company writer, but it sounds fantastic: a real benefit to customers and a great way to reward the best writers while also keeping complaints and revision requests to a minimum.

I have reason to believe that many clients hardly even bother to read the assignments that they purchase before they turn them in for credit; they just count the pages or words, maybe read the headings and subheadings, and lightly skim the actual essays. So, the first thing you should do is read the project thoroughly and make sure that you understand what each and every sentence means and also what each and every word means. You don't want to stare back at your tutor looking like a deer in headlights when asked what you meant by a particular sentence or word choice. However, don't expect your writer to appreciate emails from you asking to explain every word or sentence that you may not understand unless that was something you and your writer specifically agreed about in advance. Unless you tell us to write something at a very simple level, we write college essays and grad-school essays at the appropriate level for the assignment and we expect that our clients placing those orders are fully capable of reading and understanding any project they commission us to write. Just read your project line by line so you understand every argument and every point and look up any word that isn't in your vocabulary.

For customers, your biggest risk in this industry is getting ripped off trying to find a legit provider whose work you like. If you manage to do that, you'll want to continue using the same provider if possible.

Obviously, that suggestion isn't meant as a stand-alone guarantee; and the context of my suggestion is in comparison to the alternative of just forking over full payment to a total stranger (or strange company) for a huge project in advance. Just about every time I've ever suggested it was in response to someone's story about having been ripped off on a large project by a writer (or company) that he's never used before.

Ideally, one would want to build up trust by trying out any new provider with a few shorter projects before taking the plunge with an entire major pre-paid project. The fact of the matter is that, more often than not, customers don't leave themselves enough time to do that; so the next best thing is to order a few pages before ordering an entire project. Finally, even if it's not foolproof against the hardcore scammers, it's still helpful to test the quality of work from essay providers who aren't hardcore scammers, simply because the talents and abilities of even legit (or legitimately-intentioned) writers still range from those who aren't that good or that experienced to those who are extremely good and highly experienced.

@doh_j
Unfortunately, you probably can't use any of it. Even if you rewrote all the content from scratch, a scan would still show all of the same literature, and as you say, the order of argument is critical, so you can't really change that, either. Under the circumstances, I might ask them for a 50% refund and an agreement to go your separate ways peacefully by allowing you exclusive use of the content. Tell them that you just want an amicable solution but if your project comes up on any scan or is published by them in any way or offered for sale, you'll have no choice but to identify the company here and post an excerpt showing just how bad it really is.


Totally incorrect. I believe you're erroneously attributing a post (#9) from someone else (a company rep named "Kevinson") to me. For the record, I have always suggested that new clients of freelance writers and of essay companies alike always try out any new provider with a short project of a few pages before trusting them with a longer project; and I have never suggested that anybody give any provider a second chance after blowing a first project.


Absolutely incorrect. A perfect example would be this thread attacking my primary competitor for clients at the time. I could have chimed in to attack him or simply stayed quiet to let him absorb as much damage as possible while hoping to benefit from that by picking off whatever prospective clients he lost as a result of the thread. Instead, I was the first one to respond to that thread to defend him based on what I knew of him and his work at the time. I wouldn't even revive that old thread now just to refute your argument if I didn't know that he moved on from this business years ago and now works a traditional fulltime job as the director of a corporate writing department.

https://essayscam.org/forum/es/pheelyks-versus-freelance-writer-comparative-analysis-3051/


I admit to getting annoyed anytime anyone who works for any essay company doesn't admit that and tries to steer business away from freelance writers and toward essay companies while pretending to be an objective observer without any personal interest in any essay company. I haven't said a word to defend or otherwise comment about the essay company to which you're referring since I agreed never to discuss that company by name in 2010 as a condition of maintaining my membership here.


I agree, and if it were up to me, we'd both live up to that suggestion. In my opinion, if reps of legit companies and legit freelance writers all refrained from attacking one another and presented a united front against the scammers of both varieties, we'd all benefit from that while also helping customers get the most from this forum. As long as essay-company reps disparage all freelancers, especially without acknowledging that they know that some of us are totally legit and safe (because we've also written thousands of projects for some of your own essay companies), the constant bickering only benefits the scammers. Legit essay companies and freelancers should maintain a united front against the scammers for our mutual benefit as well as for the benefit of all prospective clients trying to use this forum as it is intended.

FYI, I have provided dozens of PhD dissertations, most of which started out with a short topic proposal and eventually involved extensive complex responses to the demands of reviewers (sometimes as many as 5 or 6 different sets of comments from as many different reviewers whose instructions often contradicted one another's demands outright). These types of projects typically involve 100+ pages and take the better part of a full year with all of the periodic reviews from tutors and advisors. Currently, I'm working on 3 different projects of this nature and as a solo practitioner, I obviously handle all of my own customer service. I have also provided complete projects of the length at issue here (23,000 words) in significantly less time than the 20 days involved in this particular case.


This could not be farther from the truth. Since the day I signed up here almost a decade ago, I have always responded the same way to seemingly-legit complaints about essay companies and freelance writers, including regularly encouraging clients of writers who ripped them off to identify those writers here publicly for the benefit of other. Here's just one example in this thread right here:

https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/research-writer-threatening-4611/


Here's another in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/disappointed-ripped-off-member-2404/
My first response (#4) was:


My post (#25) in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/wc/academic-writer-done-3855/#msg61617 is too long to quote, but I interceded on behalf of a client who never even use my services, by contacting the writer who botched his project and was refusing to provide any refund. Long story short was that it was a project that I declined, precisely because I wasn't confident enough that I'd be able to do it well. The client found another writer who was far less qualified and who should never have even considered such a difficult project. I contacted that writer and strongly suggested that he issue a refund because he had absolutely no business taking on that project and because I was going to recommend to the client that he identify the writer here publicly if he didn't.

I have also defended essay companies with which I had no familiarity whatsoever against complaints that were obviously unreasonable, such as demands to provide rewrites because the customer changed his mind about the topic after the fact and demands to be allowed to just cancel an order for a full refund only days before the due date but many weeks after ordering the project.

As between the two of us, I have always admitted to being a freelance writer (as well as which essay companies I have written for) and I have never started any threads designed to subtly disparage all essay companies to steer prospective customers away from companies and toward freelancers. You choose not to identify yourself as an employee of an essay company and you have started quite a few threads that are very thinly-veiled attempts to do exactly that: steer all prospective customers toward companies and away from all freelance writers, such as this one here: https://essayscam.org/forum/wc/terms-service-ordering-professional-freelance-4608/

I have suggested many times and I continue to suggest that legit essay companies and legit freelance writers should never attack one another or support other companies or writers blindly, because the real enemies of all legit essay providers and all innocent customers are the rip-off artists, irrespective of whether they rip customers off posing as legit companies or as legit freelancers. I stand by that suggestion and I believe that if you review the threads linked above, you should apologize for suggesting that I defend all freelancers "no matter what."

That's not what the OP said. Do you have some knowledge of this situation beyond what's been presented here by the OP?
According to my read, the original agreement between the customer and the company was as described right here:


According to my read, the customer paid for a 20-day deadline and only indicated any deadline flexibility after the company asked for multiple extensions:


According to my read, the customer eventually ran out of patience with the continuous delays and only after the company repeatedly failed to meet even its own newly-promised deadlines, and after the customer finally made clear that no further delays would be tolerated. Even with all that, they missed the deadline and sent back an old draft instead of the new section that was promised. Five months later, the customer has still received less than half of the literature review that was paid for with delivery promised in 20 days:


If this happens to have been your company involved, why don't you give us your full account of the situation with whatever details have been left out? If this wasn't your company, why are you apparently trying so hard to defend this kind of service? Again, rest assured that if this were a freelance writer involved rather than an essay company, my response and advice would be identical; would yours?

My response wasn't based at all on the OP's subjective characterization about the writing not being up to the PhD level; and if that had been his only complaint, I wouldn't have just taken his word for it. My response was based on the admission by the company that a refund was duefor the ridiculous delays and for the attempt by the writer to pawn off older versions of previously-delivered work to pretend to satisfy a new deadline. If those are regular practices at that company, it's a scam company; and if they aren't and it's just the fault of one bad writer at a legit company, I'd expect the company to refund the customer and fire the writer without paying him anything for a 20-day-deadline project not completed in 5 months while giving a customer the runaround. The company wasn't identified, so I'm not taking anybody's side and, obviously, my response was predicated on the assumption that the objective parts of the complaint pertaining to the deadline and the redelivery of old content were true.

My decision to work for myself had nothing to do with any such problems at the essay company; it was strictly because I can earn approximately twice as much from the same amount of writing without any essay company taking its cut from work obtained through them. There's nothing wrong with that because they have all of the overhead and they get the clients, but once I built up a large enough clientele to go solo, that made much more economic sense for me. In my experience, the company for which I wrote the most was very fair about rewrite requests and always rejected them if they weren't justified requests, which was almost always the case. If I was at fault, the company didn't have to get involved beyond transmitting the customer's request to me, because I didn't refuse to fix the project. (The vast majority of the time, rewrite requests were based on after-the-fact demands that were never mentioned in the original order and the company always explained to the customer why any newly-added specs had to be paid for.)

To answer your question directly: Yes. If I still hadn't delivered a "20-day-deadline" project after 5 months, I'd fully expect the company to withhold 100% of my fee, because, among other things, I'd be exposing the company to very bad publicity and I'd have cost them a customer. I take full responsibility for my mistakes. Whether it's a company project or freelance work, if I accidentally write about the wrong topic, answer all 4 questions in 10 pages instead of picking 1 question for the whole 10 pages as required by the original specs, use the wrong textbook for the project, or screw up any project in any other way through my own fault, I'd fully expect either to earn nothing for the project or to provide a complete rewrite if I expected to get paid. Even the best writers occasionally make honest mistakes. When we do, we have to take responsibility for them whether we work for ourselves or write for an essay company with vicarious responsibility for the mistakes of its writers.

You're still way too defensive about any criticism of any essay company. You seem to have missed the part, entirely, about the (un-named) company in question specifically giving him the option of a full refund. FYI, my advice to him would have been identical in the exact same situation involving any un-named freelancer, just as it has been many times in the past when customers have complained about non-delivery of projects or about delivery of work whose poor quality justified a complaint against freelancers. I've also suggested that they identify the freelancer who ripped them off. That's what this whole forum is supposed to be about.


Unlike whatever essay company was involved here, I don't take payment for 20-day delivery and then fail to deliver for 5 months, or ever provide anything written in ESL English, and I don't try to resend any old work for new deadlines. If I ever found myself unable to make a deadline, I'd offer the client a refund without even having to be asked and as soon as I came to that realization instead of making continual excuses and dragging the client through a 5-month-long ordeal so that I could try to keep his money.

I don't know whether your obvious hostility toward me here over this is because it was your company involved, but if it was, your annoyance really should be with your writer who missed all his deadlines and then resent the customer old versions of the project, and not with me for suggesting which of two specific offered options to choose. If it wasn't your company, let me suggest again, as I have many times previously to all of the undisclosed essay-company reps, employees, and owners here, that legit essay companies and legit freelance writers should all consider themselves united on the same side against all of the illegitimate scam companies and scam writers rather than blindly choosing tribal allegiance to (all) other companies or (all) other freelancers. If the OP's complaint is truthful, nobody should be defending what the company involved apparently did in this customer's situation or getting angry at the suggestion that the customer take the company up on its offer of a full refund just because that suggestion happens to come from a freelance writer.

It's not to your advantage to publish it "preemptively." If their position is that they own the work because they refunded you, it will just give them an excuse to publicize your name in connection with the transaction instead of publishing it just to make it worthless to you, which will pop up anytime a prospective employer Googles you. They have no interest in publishing it except to make it worthless to you, so you can't really beat them that way even if you do manage to publish it first.

You're not really accepting what I've suggested: namely, that the work is already worthless to you and that you should just start the project over instead of letting it become a bigger problem for you than the wasted time and money. Accept that the money and time are both already gone and don't compound your loss by turning some lost money and time into lost money and time plus long-term damage to your reputation. Take them up on their 100% refund offer and start over as outlined in my prior post.

Ask for the full refund and just start over with a new writer. Chances are they'll sell the paper anyway and if you use it, your whole academic career will be at risk by their publishing it. My guess is that they're not really going to refund you a penny and they're just pretending to offer that option to delay your realization that you've already been totally ripped off. If and when you do start over with a new provider, always test them out first with a short Introduction section before you pay them for anything longer. Until you're confident that you've found a high-quality professional provider, continue to order only in small sections and make clear that they'll have to make each and every deadline for you to continue doing business with them. Your account of the situation doesn't indicate whether the sections you received were being paid for one at a time or if you paid for them all up front and were just receiving them one at a time. If you paid for them one at a time, you should have just bailed the first time you received sub-par work.

Frankly, your assumption about the quality of work that can be done (or that should be expected) on 23,000 words in 20 days is totally erroneous; it just depends on finding a good reliable writer. But you only get what you pay for (especially in this business); so if you're not willing to pay what good writers charge for high-quality work, don't be shocked when a provider who charges significantly less for the same project only produces drivel, making it much more expensive in the long run than just going with a high-quality provider in the first place and paying the fair market rate for high-quality work of this nature.

Once they have all your money up front, they have all the leverage, they don't have much of an incentive to pressure the writer to complete it on time, and you're pretty much at their mercy when things go wrong. Try to understand that your money (and the time you spent on the project on your end) is probably already lost and that your choice now is to make smarter decisions going forward. In all likelihood, no matter what you do, you're unlikely to be getting any money back or to be able to use your own work on the project safely. Learn from the lesson and just try to make better decisions going forward to get your dissertation completed.

Whenever I see these types of posts, I can't help but to just go to check out the sites, so I clicked on the "Services" tab and read through the "Best Quality Assignment Writing Services" section. It's horrendous ESL gibberish full of obvious indicators (especially to any professor reading this kind of writing) that it's written by someone who speaks English as a second language.

Beyond the many ESL indicators and about a dozen grammar mistakes per paragraph, many of the sentences say nothing and/or are totally out of any logical order in relation to the rest of the sentences in their paragraphs.

Some gems:

"Assignment writing is known as one of the widely and broad types of academic writing."
"Assignment writing is a tips that defines different types of assignments..."
"Our writers are experienced and belong from a professional background."
"Our online assignment service not only help student to complete their task..."
"On helping the students on their respective assignments our professional assignment writing experts also focuses to submit the assignments on the specified time."

Even as independent contractors, we still have a contract with the companies; it's just able to be terminated by either party at will. As totally independent writers, our contract with customers still consists of everything represented on our websites and everything agreed to in our pre-payment communications, irrespective of whether or not there's anything specifically referred to (or signed) as a "contract," per se.


Not sure what the connection is that you have in mind between the existence of a contract and whether or not that work experience needs to be disclosed. Contracts by themselves don't leave any paper trail, but legit American essay companies generate annual 1099 tax forms, so there's still a record of your employment capable of being identified, if that's what you're getting at.


Not necessarily, at least not in terms of examining every prior job, anyway. When I filled out my SF-86 after being hired by the federal government, I fully disclosed the essay company for which I'd been writing as well as the "gentlemen's club" where I'd worked as a bouncer and manager. Probably the only thing they really investigate are criminal and financial history and child-support compliance.

The only companies for which I've ever written in this business paid by paper check and/or direct deposit or Money Gram. All of those require a match between your ID and the name by which the company knows you. If someone buys a writer account from a writer registered with a company, how does the new (fraudulent) owner of the account even get paid by the company?

The last time I checked, the TOS of the essay company for which I provided more projects than any other specifically prohibited customers from submitting their product for academic credit. Unless they've since changed their TOS, they actually do require customers to include a citation referencing the essay company as a source of any information incorporated into the customer's submitted work. You may draw your own conclusions about why they do this and about whether or not they really believe that any of their customers actually include (XYZ Custom Essays, Inc.* 2017) as citations within the projects they submit for academic credit.

*[Not the real company name]

I don't think you can learn to write in a convincing EFL voice just through practice, no matter how much writing you do, simply because you'll just be making the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. The only way would be to live with EFLs long enough to pick up idiomatic expressions and to have EFLs point out every awkward element of grammar and syntax that is characteristic of ESL English that you will, otherwise, never successfully eliminate from your English. Unless someone corrects you in real time whenever you're speaking English, there will probably always be easily-identifiable indicators that you're ESL in your English speech and writing. However, if you already speak English fluently and you have EFLs around you at all times to point out and correct every mistake, you could probably achieve EFL-like fluency in a year or two.