Whenever someone posts this kind of thing as his first post on the forum, you can be fairly certain that it's someone affiliated with whatever company they're pretending to be "asking" about and not a real student or customer genuinely interested in the responses to the question (except maybe the responses their coworkers will be posting pretending to be other satisfied customers).


If someone you know personally already told you that he got a great paper from them, you wouldn't need to be asking total strangers here for their opinions.

If you mean test a new writer with a small paid project, that's exactly what I've suggested many times instead of waiting until you need a long project for a short deadline. However, if by "test,"you mean ask a writer to write something for you for free as a test, you're already limiting yourself to new, inexperienced, or desperate writers, because (with some possible exceptions) most of us who are already in high demand just don't have time to spend writing any unpaid "tests" for prospective clients. Typically, new clients who don't yet know that they can trust me will order a short Introduction of a few pages for the much longer project that they're considering ordering from me; others will just order a short 2 or 3-page project early in the school term before trusting me with a longer, much more important one later in the term.

I'm not sure what you're talking about in relation to samples, but I agree that "samples" are unreliable because you really have no way of knowing who actually wrote them. On quite a few occasions, I've been contacted by obvious middlemen scammers asking me for a few pages that I could tell they were almost certainly planning on representing to clients as their work to scam them out of the payment for the entire project based on my sample work.

In my opinion, the web copy reads suspiciously similar to the English of the person who posted that review.

It's also a little strange that an ordinary customer would wait until he used a service for more than one year before posting that kind of review. Ordinarily, it's relatively new customers who are most likely to post such reviews right after their first positive experience with a service provider, because that's when they're most relieved to have found a reliable service and most appreciative. Also, "Celeste," it seems ridiculously coincidental that the video was first posted online yesterday and that you just happened to find it last night or this morning, the same day that you also registered on this forum. Of course, it would be even more "coincidental" if the missing word in one of the sample essays mentioned below were to suddenly be added where it belongs in that sample essay shortly after this conversation with someone who's just a customer.

More importantly, in my opinion, the two sample essays that I checked (Childhood Obesity and Clinical Issues in Health Care Medicine) were definitely not written by someone whose native language is English. The many unnecessary and incorrect uses of the article "the" is one of the same dead giveaways that always betray ESL forum members here who try to pretend that they are American or British instead of just representing themselves honestly as ESL writers. There are also some incorrect use of idioms and obvious missing words (such as the word "television" at the end of the second-to-last paragraph of the Obesity essay). Finally, those two essays themselves actually say almost nothing substantive about their respective topics. To me, they read very much like a cartoon that I have under glass on my desk showing a student writing an exam essay titled The Industrial Revolution and writing "The Industrial Revolution was very industrial. It was also very revolutionary. Because of this, it was a very industrial revolution..." Since those are the essays they've chosen to post as samples, I assume they are the highest quality of writing and proofreading that they can produce for a college speech/presentation and a college essay, respectively.

I tried a speech-recognition program a few years ago with similar results. However, it was more than just the inaccuracy of the software that was an issue for me. Writing and speaking don't necessarily rely on the same neural pathways and I just found it much harder to compose the same types of sentences and paragraphs (and to edit them as I write) that come so easily to me when I'm typing. In my opinion, those things might only be useful for people composing bullet points or very simple thank-you notes and things like that than they are for more complex types of writing. Then again, it might also be particular to the person.

When I applied for my last traditional job as a writer/editor for the federal government, I'd already been doing this for years and it wasn't anything that I hid during the interview process. In fact, I discussed it in some detail because the range of subjects that I'd been covering and the fact that I was so used to handling multiple overlapping short deadlines were both valuable skills from the employer's point of view. They had roughly 400 applicants for that one position, so I think it's safe to say that they didn't hold it against me. However, when I discussed it a couple of years ago with a recruiter for a company in Switzerland, he told me in no uncertain terms that Swiss companies would not look favorably at all on this kind of work experience. I suspect that might be the same view of employers in academia.

I've never been paid by the hour as a freelance writer, but I had an e-lance client who paid roughly $100 per page and the work (veterinary information site) was a lot easier than most of my regular freelance academic work.

Not male people.

I don't really have any opinion on the rating system. Now that the search function has been changed to allow people to search for writers by their forum user names, I no longer have any problem with that, either. Initially, I criticized it harshly because it provided no notice at all to users that the only way to search for any writer here was to enter that writer's email address and not his or her forum user name. In the vast majority of cases, users of the search function only know writers by their user names and don't know any writer's email address, largely because writers are prohibited from posting them publicly. If users tried searching any writer's forum user name, the system always responded that any writer searched was unknown or had chosen to hide his or her profile info, together with this ominous warning symbol. Until they changed the system, it seemed to me that the only way for any writer to avoid the inference that he or she was "unknown" and/or "hiding" his or her info was to pay for a listing by user name. Now that writers are searchable by their forum user names, the search function is probably beneficial to both writers and prospective customers.

That's not entirely surprising considering that this is a totally unregulated industry conducted online, largely between customers and service providers who remain anonymous to one another in which there are dozens of scammers masquerading as "writers" for every legitimate freelance writer and perhaps 100+ scam companies for every legitimate essay company with new ones popping up as soon as their old scams get exposed. There are also hundreds of inexperienced and/or totally unqualified writers (both freelance and company writers) just "dabbling" at this because they're unemployed or just trying to do it part time until they can find "real" fulltime jobs doing something else.

In my opinion, the last thing that most customers in this industry would ever want is any public thread connecting their friends, classmates, coworkers, employers or prospective employers, and their family members to their freelance writer or ghostwriter, as the case may be. I was a relatively early adopter of online socializing (AOL 3.0 in 1997) and met a lot of women (including my wife) through AOL Instant Messaging at that time, back when many people still considered it extremely "weird" to meet people online. Nowadays, meeting online is one of the most common ways that single people get together.

Since I'm married, I never really had any need for MySpace or Facebook or Twitter and I don't participate, even slightly, in the whole world of online socializing except for this and a couple of other interest-specific forums. Now, it's sort of my turn to think it's really weird that people spend so much of their time looking up high school friends as 50-year-olds, constantly "updating" their public profiles and posting pictures of their dinner plates, and "following" the inane 140-or-fewer-character ramblings of "celebrities" whose success or talents have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of their written thoughts.

I lose potential clients all the time because I just don't have the time or patience for the customer service that some of them require. Scammers have all the time in the world to answer endless questions and to provide reassurance after reassurance, mainly, because "customer service" is 100% of their job. Once they have your money, their job is done and they just can move right on to their next victims. Those of us who are busy actually writing the projects we book have a limited amount of time available for reassuring skittish clients, especially when it involves answering questions already detailed in our website FAQ sections. If they have plenty of time before their deadline, I offer to schedule just a small prepaid section before they pay for the whole thing; but if they don't contact me until two days before their 20-pg project is due, I tell them that there's really nothing I can do to reassure them and they just didn't leave themselves enough time to try out any new writer with a small project before trusting someone with a large prepaid project, as I've suggested here many times.

The clients I let go the quickest are those who approach me with very small and easy projects of a few pages but continue requesting more and more assurances after I've responded in no uncertain terms that I can do the project for their deadline with a very high level of confidence. Same goes for those who think this is going to be a highly-interactive collaborative process and request continual updates or "input" while their project is pending on my calendar. Sometimes, they start off that way and I explain how I do and don't do business; then they adjust their expectations and give me the benefit of the doubt and we have no problems after that.

About once a week, I have to tell a new prospective client that we've already reached or exceeded the amount of emailing that I can afford to do for a particular project and that I'm more than happy to write it, but not if the email pattern they've established is going to continue. Some of them take the plunge and are very relieved when they receive their work on or before their due dates and others disappear and (I assume) continue their search for a reliable essay provider. Others ask me to "match" the lower price of someone else's quote and then email me frantically a week or two later asking whether I can still do the project because they got ripped off by someone else or received back useless and/or plagiarized junk from the provider whose price I refused to "match." At least a half a dozen times, people have ended up passing on my quote, paying someone else to do it, and then paying me more than I quoted originally to redo their project, but in a rush.

At this point in my "career" (such as it is), I'm able to let clients go if their initial email pattern is just out of synch with the pattern with which I'm more comfortable. My favorite clients are those who take the time to read my FAQs carefully, provide the exact information requested for me to be able to quote a price in my very first response, and then just pay for work so that I can add it to my calendar and get back to work. If you're a good writer new to this business, the "high-maintenance" prospective clients that I lose fairly regularly might be your niche for the time being.

The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow Paper.

You're purposely obfuscating a very simple objection. I haven't commented on your reasoning and I'm certainly not "lashing out." I only replied again to this topic in response to your twisting my words by saying that I expect you to issue a specific notice that your warnings about anonymous writers don't apply to me, personally, each and every time the topic comes up, because I never said any such thing. I don't even disagree that your warnings apply to the vast majority of totally anonymous writers using only their emails.

My only objection is that you know as well as anybody that there are several writers registered here under the same S/Ns that they use on the essay company whose admin screens you can access and you know that we're reputable and very good at what we do, whether it's for the essay company that you consider the best in the business or on a freelance basis. You know our names and addresses, our social security numbers and bank accounts, how much we earned every year that we wrote for that company, how often we were requested by essay-company customers, and you know our reputations as writers.

It would require very little thought and only the most minimal effort on your part not to disparage us "accidentally" in your warnings to customers about all the rip-off artists who infect this industry. In fact, it would take only a very small fraction of the thought or effort to type out qualifiers in your warnings (such as "while there are some reputable writers who still do business under their AOL or Gmail accounts...") that it takes for you to engage in these sorts of protracted arguments. The fact that you refuse to do so makes it very obvious that your preference is to disparage us purposely rather than choosing words to avoid doing so in the process of warning customers about rip-off artists. That suggests to me that you're not an "impartial" or "objective" observer at all, but someone with very specific personal interests in steering any and all customers away from all freelance writers (including those you know to be totally legitimate) and toward the essay companies against whom the scam companies that you devote so much time to outing compete. In my opinion, you view all freelance writers as competitors for business and your blanket statements are intended to disparage all of us for your benefit and hardly just to "warn" clients about the real threats out there for their benefit and without any benefit to you at all, as some sort of altruistic contribution to the world.

Actually, my business hasn't increased compared to what it was before you started hammering away here that customers should "never" trust "any" writer using an AOL (or other plain) email address to do business or "any" writer who advertises on Essay Chat. I'd already purchased several domains 4 or 5 years ago but never got around to doing anything with any of them because I already had almost more than enough business relying only on my email address. In general, I'm slow to adopt changes unless there's a need: I'm perfectly happy using my wife's old Motorola Razr phone and I still play hockey in vintage equipment from the 1980s just because I like it better.

I no longer really had any choice but to shift to a website with my own domain, just to escape from underneath that intentionally very broad blanket of doubt and suspicion that you cast here over "any" and "all" freelance writers using generic emails. Since shifting to my website, my business has returned to roughly where it was before. Previously, my AOL email address, my forum S/N, and the goodwill and reputation that I'd established for my work over many years were the only "branding" that I ever really needed and I was no less "accountable" or trustworthy operating that way for more than a decade than I am now with a better website.

First, thank you. Second, my only frustration is over the words "any," "all," "anyone," and "never" instead of "most" or "majority." I believe you'd agree that in the universe of all essay companies in existence, very many if not most of them are either outright rip-offs or producers of horrible essays written by people who have no business calling themselves "writers," especially writers in the English language. But I believe that you and Writers2Beware would both flip your lids if any freelance writer posted advice here telling customers "never" to trust "any" essay company.

I don't even disagree that 20% is probably a much higher percentage than the actual proportion of legitimate writers in the universe of all writers using only their email addresses to do business. Likewise, you probably agree that the vast majority of all essay companies advertising online should not be trusted, either; but you wouldn't appreciate it if a freelancer posted that customers should "never" trust "any" essay company because they're "all" unreliable.

My most recent contribution to this thread had been a very benign post about the beneficial effect of having recently shifted to using my own domain. Then W2B posted an inaccurate and sarcastic subjective interpretation of my position claiming that I expected to be excepted "individually" each and every time the issue of writers with anonymous emails is discussed, which is absolutely untrue. All I expect here is the more accurate and fair use of language instead of deliberately over-broad warnings whose obvious intent seems to be to disparage all members of a group instead of an admittedly very large subgroup. I have tried to make the argument many times that legitimate essay companies and legitimate freelance writers should both recognize that we are all on the same side against scammers of both varieties and that neither should disparage the other (especially intentionally) in the fight against bad or scamming writers and bad or scamming essay companies.

You routinely make blanket statements that are very obviously designed to steer customers toward essay companies and away from any and all freelance writers. You warn customers "never" to trust "anyone" who uses just an email address without any hint that you know for a fact that there are exceptions to that general rule, such as in the form of several long-term forum members who have built up a decade or more of goodwill in our email addresses and who have used those same email addresses as essay-company writers at the companies to which you have referred as the best in the business.

Likewise, you've given the following advice despite your knowledge that several of the best writers in this business advertise our services on EssayChat and that your statements are very detrimental to our business:


and


both in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/es/emails-deceptive-anonymous-writers-gmail-yahoo-826/2/


Of course not. But I believe that you know that your blanket statements are equally harmful to legitimate freelance writers who (for whatever reason) have chosen to continue doing business under their long-time email addresses and that with very little effort, you could use qualifiers like "most" instead of making statements that are obviously as damaging to some very good and reliable freelance writers as they are to the scammers. I believe that you write well enough that you'd use appropriate qualifiers (just for the sake of accuracy, if nothing else) if you didn't also consider good freelance writers to be your competitors and if it weren't in your financial interests to steer all potential clients to essay companies partly by disparaging all freelancers with intentionally over-broad blanket statements that you know as well as anybody don't apply to some of us at all.

That's strictly your interpretation and not what I ever said. I objected to your blanket statements that seemed to me to be deliberately overbroad and meant to raise doubts about all freelance writers, including those you know for a fact as totally legitimate writers and as some of the best, most prolific, and most reliable writers who ever wrote for the top essay companies, including the very large American company that you say you don't own or work for but have previously mentioned having access to their internal admin screens.

I objected to your refusal to acknowledge that some of the very best writers in this industry still relied on their regular emails and that there's a big difference between unknown writers with anonymous emails who are totally new to the scene and writers who have been using the same email for more than a decade and also posting openly on this board for many years under IDs obviously and intentionally derived from those email addresses, as well as using those same IDs as their company writer user names at companies to which you have referred as the best of the best. I objected to the way that you seemed to be deliberately steering all potential customers to essay companies and away from any freelance writers in general, by refusing to ever acknowledge, even once, that there were any obvious exceptions to your general warnings about dealing with writers identified only by their email addresses. Any qualification, such as "while there are some exceptions..." or "although there are some legit writers who still choose to do business under their old emails..." would have been appreciated, even without having mentioned any of us specifically.

I'd been chugging along just fine that way and only shifted to using my own domain because I knew that your statements would be harmful to the business of all of us legit freelancers; and I believed that you made no effort to distinguish us from the rip-off artists about whom you were warning people because steering business away from us as well as from the rip-off artists was intentional and beneficial to you.

I've also noticed this. New clients sometimes go into great detail about their situations and the various reasons they're in need of writing services. It's really not necessary. On my website review page, I've explained that I understand much better than they might assume how intimidating writing assignments can be, especially for undergraduates. As a student, I dreaded term papers just as much as they do; and I never imagined that I'd be making a living writing them someday.

The vast majority of my clients are repeat customers and their friends. New clients are always trickling in, but, admittedly, at a faster rate since I created a website with my own domain.

While it's never pleasant to get ripped off, you did the smart thing by trying them out with a very short project before trusting them with something much more expensive and important. Ideally, new clients should also leave themselves a deadline cushion so that if the company or writer turns out to be unreliable, at least you can still find someone else to make your deadline. The last thing you want to do is try out an essay-service provider for the first time with an expensive project and no deadline cushion on your end. Depending on what options you have about disputing the charge for failing to make your specified deadline, you should also try to recoup your money that way. Good luck.

Understood. This forum and Essay Chat are apparently doing their best to close loopholes that have previously allowed scammers to exploit their anonymity on those platforms.


The proportion of genuine writers using AOL and other similar emails as a subset of fake writers doing the same is probably not much different from the proportion of legitimate essay companies as a subset of the thousands of legitimate-looking essay companies that are just fronts for scammers. It wouldn't take very much effort (or anything beyond fairness and good-faith intellectual honesty) for anybody posting about the dangers of anonymous solo writers to say something along the lines of "While there are certainly some good writers using their anonymous emails, customers should obviously be very wary of writers about whom they know nothing other than their email addresses." Whenever I refer to scam essay companies, I am very careful to distinguish those frauds from the legitimate companies; it would just be nice if people who have their own self-interests in promoting essay companies in general acknowledged the same about the existence of legitimate freelance writers, exactly the way you and Emilia have in this thread, especially in this relatively small community in which the individuals posting those warnings, in fact, know that some of the writers here are the same writers whose essays their companies sell.

Of course not, partly because that's an apple-to-oranges comparison. You have well-established companies and well-established freelance writers who happen to use their emails instead of websites; and you have scam websites and "random anonymous" freelancers. Obviously, well-established essay companies and well-established freelance writers can both be good choices. There are also some potential advantages and disadvantages of both that I've previously detailed in similar discussions.

I'm not leaning toward anybody and I still routinely refer clients to one of the reputable essay companies for whom I've done a lot of work even though I haven't written anything on my company account for almost 2 years. I've said many times that there's enough business in this industry for reputable essay companies and reputable freelance writers to coexist peacefully and to recognize that we're not enemies, because the real enemies are the scammers, irrespective of whether they run scam essay companies or much smaller-scale operations as solo scammers using emails.

What I resent are undisclosed principals of reputable websites who deliberately lump all freelance writers together here with the anonymous scammers, including those of us they've known for many years because we're also writers for their essay companies and they know that we've always used the exact same user names on the forum that we've always used as our writer IDs on their websites. They repeatedly warn customers never to trust any writer using AOL, for example; and they never mention that they know there are exceptions to that generally-valid proviso, despite the fact that their own companies have always communicated with us via those same AOL emails by which they know us in their company systems.

You, by contrast, are new here and know nothing about me except what you've read on this forum and you already acknowledge in your post that I'm probably a legitimate writer who's very good at what he does for a living. By contrast, there's at least one undisclosed principal of one of the essay companies that has sold thousands of essays that I wrote under the company-writer user name "FreelanceWriter" and who knows with 100% certainty that I'm the same person but still absolutely refuses to stop making blanket statements about writers who use their AOL emails and never acknowledges that those characterizations don't apply to me, or to at least 3 other writers on this forum who have also written thousands of essays for that same company and who also post here under their company user names.


One unintended consequence of this forum and Essay Chat is that they've provided a platform for some anonymous scamming writers to advertise. Previously, a scammer would have had to create a website because there were no real opportunities to advertise just an email address the way they've been doing on Essay Chat.

The other thing that you need to understand is that this forum and Essay Chat were both created by essay companies (as mentioned on the Disclosure/TOS page); and that the purpose of their existence is to retrieve some of the business that they were losing to the scam essay companies flooding the industry. Nobody who posts here does so as an altruistic exercise for the benefit of students; writers post here to help establish a good reputation and to publicize themselves in permissible ways; and essay-company owners post here to help identify as many scam companies as possible to stem the flow of customers that those scam companies can continue stealing from them.

My only problem with any of those undisclosed essay-company owners is that they never acknowledge that they know that some of us freelance writers are talented legitimate writers; instead, they continually treat all of us as though we're stealing "their" business because they don't seem to appreciate that we have the exact same right to earn an honest living writing essays as they have selling essays, including many essays that they know we've actually written for their companies. In my opinion, they should simply avoid making deliberately-overbroad statements and warnings about anonymous writers that they know are as damaging to those of us they know to be legitimate freelancers as they are to the anonymous scammers exploiting the anonymity of emails to perpetrate their scams.

I've finally switched from relying mainly on my 16 year-old email address by creating a website; but the point is that I wouldn't have had to do that but for the continual warnings that failed to acknowledge any difference between established freelance writers and totally anonymous writers. If you can author a post fairly distinguishing legitimate freelance writers using email accounts from the scammers doing so to exploit that anonymity, they could have done the same in fairness to honest freelancers and prospective customers alike.

Agreed. Some of the nicest-looking commercial websites out there are nothing but smoke screens for scammers. Their business models are based upon scamming an endless supply of inexperienced customers and on investing their resources into their customer portals instead of on hiring good writers to produce quality work for their customers. Most of the time, it's the atrocious web copy that makes it obvious that nobody in those organizations is capable of composing a grammatically-correct English sentence. However, there are also some of them whose web copy is well written even though there's not one writer in their organization who can produce a high-quality product for customers. As mentioned already, the "professional" appearance and functionality of their sites is specifically designed as their marketing strategy.


Correct. I used only my AOL email address until 2009 or 2010 when I created a simple intuit page that functioned mainly to help me avoid having to type out the same basic information repeatedly in response to new inquiries. I created a second email address posted on that page just so that I'd know how many new clients came to me after reading that page. That site had no functionality and couldn't be found on its own except to the extent it was permitted to be publicized here in my "signature" and on Essay Chat. Still, most of my new inquiries came through my main email that I've used since 1999 or 2000 and I just responded to inquiries with a link to that site where prospective clients could find the answer to most of their FAQs.

Until a few months ago, I still used only those two email addresses and that informational page for my business: and I directed any new clients who came through the newer email to my main email as soon as they became clients. I was perfectly fine doing business that way except for the fact that some people who are principals (and/or have financial interests) in large commercial essay companies continually post on this forum that writers who use their regular email addresses aren't as trustworthy as commercial essay companies with websites, and without any acknowledgement whatsoever (such as Major's above) that some of us writers who still use our email addresses for our work are some of the best writers in the business and that we're also some of the very same writers who have also been the top writers at some of the very best essay companies, including theirs. In some cases, it was their essay companies who originally asked some of us to register here years ago to help defend their companies against the false accusations against them by the scam companies that were trying to discredit them to steal their business.

After the most recent thread ( a few months ago) in which one or more undisclosed essay-company reps and/or principals again refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of some of us good and honest writers who, for whatever reason, still use our emails for business, I decided to invest the time creating a new domain so that the continual insinuations that students shouldn't trust any writer who uses an ordinary email without a website wouldn't hurt my business.

But for those continual blanket warnings without any acknowledgment of obvious exceptions to the general caution about anonymous emails, I'd never have had to bother to create a searchable domain name. In my case, it was strictly a necessary response to all of those deliberately overbroad warnings, in effect, about all writers using their email addresses for business instead of website domains.

My only complaint is that the search function makes every writer who doesn't pay to be searchable by S/N seem shady because of that ominous-sounding warning it generates unless writers pay for it not to show up. Students using that search function aren't searching for writers who paid to become searchable; they're under the impression that they can search for any writer here by username because the search box text says "Writer's Email or Username."

As I said above, the legitimate way to generate revenue would be to give more functionality to profiles of paid writers and to call them "featured" writers), not to make it look like any writer who doesn't pay is unknown or "hiding" his profile for some reason, especially with that obnoxious exclamation mark in the warning triangle. If this is an unintentional oversight, they'll fix it now that it's been pointed out to them how shady it is the way it's currently configured. In its current form, it's essentially a way of extorting money from writers because if they don't pay up, every person who searches their S/N gets that warning message about them instead of seeing the "regular" profile that (now) can only be seen if someone knows to search by the writer's email that this forum prohibits writers from divulging publicly.

I'm not doubting your ability to make anybody searchable. I'm saying it's fundamentally dishonest to provide something that looks like a helpful search function and invites users to search by "Writer's Email or Username" in the search box without disclosing that only writers who pay you can be searched by their screen names. The fact that you put "Writer's Email or Username" in the box like that makes it even worse, because a search for any writer's username who hasn't paid to be searchable by username generates this ominous-sounding quasi-warning. "[Name of Writer] - This writer does not exist in the EssayScam database of freelance writers, or has chosen to hide his/her profile at this time." Meanwhile, all it means is that the writer in question hasn't paid you to become searchable by username.

This is supposed to be a forum dedicated to exposing illegitimate business practices in this industry, right? The legitimate way of generating advertising income with the search function would have been to make everybody searchable by user name but provide more functionality to profiles of writers who pay for it. You've done the part about giving paying writers more functional profiles; but nothing discloses that the only writers whose usernames can actually be searched by username are those who have paid you and that the only way that any other writer can be searched is to enter that writer's email address.

You could also leave it the way it is but clearly disclose in the instructions about using the function that only writers who pay for becoming searchable by username can be found that way. Currently, the search function makes every writer who is searched seem shady unless he has paid you to become searchable by username. If that's unintentional, you can fix it easily; if it's intentional, it's a very deceptive business practice that harms every user who thinks that the search means something and every writer who hasn't paid to become searchable by username.

I don't think I'm confused at all.

As of 10:10 PM EST, when I put my S/N "FreelanceWriter" into the search field (here, on Essay Scam), this is the result: " FreelanceWriter - This writer does not exist in the EssayScam database of freelance writers, or has chosen to hide his/her profile at this time."

When I put my email in the search field instead of my email address, this is the result:

"Freelancewriter is one of the most experienced writers on the forum. His website is featured in the Recommended Services tab and his website review includes numerous testimonials from forum members who have used his services, as well as from several of his most experienced competitors. essayscam.org/forum/rs/nycfreelancewriter-info-users-reviews-5579/"

However, that "profile" is totally useless to any writer and to any student because you don't inform users (here, on Essay Scam) that they need to know our email first in order to search for us. Instead, any writer whose S/N (here, on Essay Scam) is searched returns the same message that implies we're unknown "or" that we've "chosen" to hide our profiles, and that exclamation mark in the triangle makes that look like it's a reason to doubt the legitimacy or trustworthiness of every freelance writer whose name is searched (here, on Essay Scam).

I'm not asking about or commenting on Essay Chat. My point is that here, on Essay Scam, the only way that any students know us writers is by our screen names. They don't know our emails because you expressly prohibit us from publicizing them (here, on Essay Scam). Students will obviously put the Essay Scam S/N of any writer they want to check out into the search field, and the result they get strongly implies that the writer for whom they searched "does not exist" and strongly implies that it's because we might have something to "hide," complete with an exclamation mark in a warning triangle, making it look like that's some sort of reason not to trust that writer, or any freelance writer, because the search for every freelance writer by S/N (here, on Essay Scam) returns the exact same result. That's a deceptive business practice because this forum is operated by an essay company that competes directly with all of us freelance writers.

If you genuinely intend to provide a useful search function (here, on Essay Scam) to help students learn more about any of the writers (here, on Essay Scam), you'd simply make our Screen Names searchable (here, on Essay Scam) instead of just our email addresses. Students (here, on Essay Scam) don't know our email addresses and writers (here, on Essay Scam) are prohibited from posting them publicly. We're not even allowed to put them in the profiles that can be clicked through our screen names. Yes, we're allowed to put them into the new profiles that pop up if someone knows to search for our emails instead of our S/N, but if someone already knows our email address, that's not helpful to anybody; and it's harmful to all legit freelance writers and to all students who don't realize that they'll get the same warning message about every writer for whom they try to search by S/N (here, on Essay Scam).

Moreover, there's nothing to indicate or inform users that it's only email addresses that can be searched and not screen names,(here, on Essay Scam). They see the search field with language telling them that they can use it to "research" any writer they want, but if they try to do that by entering any writer's S/N (here, on Essay Scam), they get that warning message saying the writer is unknown "or" purposely "hiding" something.

If this isn't a deliberate dishonest tactic of steering all customers away from all freelance writers (here, on Essay Scam), why would you refuse to simply make us all searchable by our S/N, or at the very least, make it clear in your instructions that ONLY email addresses can be searched? The first solution involves some coding; but the second solution requires nothing more than adding "Please note that only email addresses can be searched through this system, not screen names." If Essay Chat can make us searchable by S/N, why won't you?

Why would you refuse to do that if you're trying to help students (here, on Essay Scam) get to the profiles of the writers they're trying to learn more about (here, on Essay Scam) through your new search function?

The new addition seems to do absolutely nothing but trick people into thinking that all freelance writers here are "unknown" on this system or that they are purposely choosing to "hide" their information. Since this forum is operated by an essay company (as disclosed on the Disclaimer/TOS page), that's a deceptive business practice if it's deliberate. I have emailed them to alert them to this and to suggest 4 ways that they could easily cure this:

1. Make explicitly clear to users that the system only searches BY email addresses and not S/Ns (and not "for" email addresses);
2. Simply allow users to search by our forum S/Ns;
3. Allow us to post our email addresses on the forum; or
4. Place the feature only on Essay Chat where we are allowed to post our emails and not on Essay Scam where users will only search for us by our Essay Scam S/N's.

Currently, the only search term that can be used is a writer's email address; meanwhile, this forum expressly prohibits writers from divulging their email addresses on the forum. So, the only way that anybody on this forum knows us is by our S/N. If you search any S/N on that system, the message you get is "This writer does not exist in EssayScam database of freelance writers, or has chosen to hide his/her profile at this time." That is a totally untrue statement because any writer who provided his working email when registering definitely "exists" in the forum database, which is how Admin communicates with us; and if we responded to the recent email announcing this new system by creating a profile, we're certainly not "choosing" to "hide" anything.


It's much worse than a "logical stretch"; in quasi-legal terms, it's a total non-sequitur because it has nothing to do with the issue (or the statement to which it was a response) at all. It was in response to my comment about essay-company employees who choose to hide that fact while participating in threads and constantly implying (or saying outright) that essay companies are necessarily better or safer than freelance writers. The new search function has nothing to do with those members and is useless to research members who are writers because it fails to mention that the only search terms that can be used are the email addresses that we're prohibited from posting here and that the S/N of writers can't be searched.


If you hope to make a fulltime living doing this, you're going to have to be able to produce at least three times that volume in high quality and on a daily basis.

My post above was moved from a totally different thread; and I was referring to the new Freelance Writer search function, not ratings. If we're discussing the new rating system here, my only problem with it is that it seems to be based exclusively on how many times members post. That's just not a reliable indication of anything meaningful.

How do you suppose most visitors feel about purposely undisclosed employees of essay companies whose posts about freelance writers vs. essay companies are intended to seem like objective advice but whose real intention is just to steer all prospective customers away from freelancers and toward essay companies?

Nobody believes that you "don't" receive messages here through which you hope to get business. You can't even register here without a working email. Just because you repeatedly say that your messages "don't" go to a working email hardly makes it true. In fact, you once messaged me (in 2009 or 2010) asking for information about WritersBeware. I suppose the response you wanted from me wasn't ever going to get to you because you "don't" have a working email attached to your account. (Admin here can just check your old messages to prove this if they want to.)

I encourage anybody reading this to use the search function to peruse some of RustyIronChains' 733 messages on this forum before he decided to reinvent himself as "Editor75" to try a different tactic to get some business going. First, he entered "Ukraine" as his location; then he changed it to "Canada"; and lately, he's implied that he's in NY. No need to take my word for it; check Post #144 here:

https://essayscam.org/forum/wc/anyone-written-academia-research-483/4/#msg16588

You never had any problem with me until you made a goddamned fool of yourself arguing that the drinking age should be lowered because "drunk driving is a skill best learned early" and you've stalked my posts like a psychopath and attacked me routinely ever since. Prior to that, you even defended me when an essay company ripped me off. You had no problem with me back then.

You're here for the same reason as every forum member with "Freelance Writer" next to his S/N is here for the same reason. The difference is that most of us are honest about it and select "Freelance Writer" or "Company Rep" whereas you choose not to identify your reason for being here. I respond substantively to the topics of threads and you typically respond to those substantive posts with nothing but personal attacks against me that have nothing to do with the thread topic.

You have no problem with any of the other legitimate writers who have repeatedly vouched for me and referred to me as the "best in the business" both here and on EssayChat even though their contributions to this forum are no different from mine. I post without violating any forum rules and sometimes I purchase advertising for my business. Your hatred of me has nothing to do with any "principle"; you just can't get past being embarrassed (rightfully) in a stupid argument about drunk driving about 3 years ago and I suspect that you're also angry because I seem to be doing pretty well in this industry. That's all there is to your continual attacks and lies.

My posts are my genuine opinions and thoughts about thread topics and I don't pretend that I'm here to "help others" the way you pretend, although many forum members have indicated that they found my posts to be extremely helpful, most recently, in this thread, coincidentally. Your posts are nothing but very thinly-veiled attempts to establish credibility by pretending to be a vigilante "against" fraudulent companies in hopes that this will convince customers to trust you with their projects. In fact, if you aren't here for the same reason as every other writer, you're clinically insane for wasting as much time here as you do and for engaging in all those online chats with essay companies to post those logs. That's especially true considering some of your old posts as "RustyIronChains" in which you said that all customers in this industry "deserve" to be ripped off. I encourage anybody reading this to use the search function to peruse some of RustyIronChains' 733 messages on this forum before he decided to reinvent himself as "Editor75" to try a new and different tactic to get some business going for himself.

What you want people to believe is that you're "not" here for business; you're just an altruist who's chosen the academic ghostwriting industry to "clean up" as your contribution to human society. You're not concerned about all the phony foreign companies manufacturing fake pharmaceutical drugs for sale; you're not concerned with human trafficking, or with rip-offs in 1,000 different industries that directly affect human health and welfare much more than the academic writing industry. No; you're here under a S/N "Editor75" posting more than 2,000 times since changing your S/N in 2010 just to help police the academic-writing-for-hire industry for the benefit of humanity and "not" to get business here. Sure.

I didn't have a "bad experience" with the company at all. It was the same company that I got in trouble here for defending too much against completely untrue accusations posted by competitors who couldn't compete against them fairly without outright lies and malicious innuendo, just like yours against me ever since you embarrassed yourself badly in an argument with me about three years ago.


Obviously, the company has access to all communications if they choose to look at them. What you either don't understand (or are just pretending not to understand for the purpose of throwing mud at me) is that each paid order has its own messages between the customer of that order and the writer who takes that order. The messages are automatically emailed to the writer and they communicate that way (anonymously) through that system. The glitch is that once the order is paid, the customer can use that system (immediately) to post a message to the "writer"; but nobody (sorry, I mean NO WRITER) ever receives that message unless or until a writer actually takes that order, and the customer has no way of knowing that. Once the order is taken, the writer gets an on-screen notice that there are messages posted on the order.

Actually, I realized a long time ago that any writer could check for those messages even while the order was still posted, and sometimes I used to send a message that way if I had a question whose answer would help me decide whether or not to take the order. But the point was that what happens, ordinarily, is that the customer posts messages (like "I forgot to say that I need this by 8:00 AM not 8:00 PM!" or "Please only answer Question #1") but there's no "writer" to receive that message because the order is just sitting there on the board, still untaken by any writer. Sometimes, if a project that I liked had a rush deadline that I couldn't make, I'd use that glitch to ask the customer whether he or she could allow another 12 hours (or whatever) and if the answer was yes, I'd then take the order and notify Admin that the customer agreed to a longer deadline. By clicking the Messages tab, writers could contact the customer and then check back to look for an answer, but messages from the client never got sent to any writer while the order was still posted on the board and there was nothing to indicate to anybody that there were messages on the order. No other writer that I know ever realized that you could check for messages on orders still posted on the board.


I never "left" that company; my account is still active as of today. As my freelance business grew, I started writing fewer and fewer company projects simply because I earn much more for freelance work without any essay company as a middleman. Essay companies take up to 50% of the fee paid by clients and the most this one pays out to writers (except for the emergencies to which I alluded in my prior post) is $20/pg, which is substantially less than I charge for even the cheapest work.

Four or five years ago, I was routinely writing about $6,000 to $8000 of projects for this company monthly, of which I received approximately half. Gradually, as I began doing more and more direct freelance work, I cut back on my company work. Eventually, I was writing only a few hundred dollars of projects for them every month instead of several thousand dollars' worth. By the end of 2014, I was hardly taking any orders at all and I believe the last company order I took was in September of 2014, when I earned only $162 for the month. I still maintain a good relationship with the company and regularly refer clients to them (as well as to a few other writers) for projects that I don't want or can't do. Working primarily as a freelance writer instead of primarily as an essay-company writer, my income is double what it used to be. That's the only reason that I haven't taken an essay-company order in almost 2 years.


Actually, customers (especially those new to this forum) should know that "Editor75" used to be "RustyIronChains" here. If you use the search function, just check for some of his "contributions" under his old ID. (Always make sure that you change the default "Titles" to "Messages" so that your search returns aren't limited just to threads with his ID in the title of threads.) I don't "bash" any essay companies; when posters who (I believe) are undisclosed principals or employees of essay companies announce the reasons that they want people to believe that essay companies are necessarily "better" or "safer" than freelancers, I respond with my opinion to the contrary. That's how Internet forums work.

You'll find that as "RustyIronChains," this same guy who now pretends to be some white knight vigilante against fraud in this business use to brag quite proudly about ripping off clients in several different industries, including this one (by reselling old projects as new projects to unsuspecting clients paying for "original" work). You should also know that he's a consummate hypocrite whose animus against me goes back to the argument to which I referred in the beginning of this post. When I purchased a banner ad last year, he responded like this, arguing that the Recommended Services section was much "better vetted" than the banner ads (emphasis supplied):

https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/advertising-possible-2302/#msg74138



So, now, he apparently doesn't like that I'm listed in the Recommended Services section.

"Editor75" is here for the exact same reason as everybody else (who isn't a student/customer): he hopes his posts here will get him work from customers. He hopes that by posting chat logs with fraudulent essay companies, he can establish himself as someone whose on the side of customers and that you'll contact him for your projects. He continually attacks and lies about me because of a very old argument and (I suspect) because he knows that I'm a lot more successful doing this for a living than he has ever been, both as an essay-company writer and as a freelance writer. I maintain good relationships with every other legitimate competitor here who competes against me through his or her work and without these kinds of fraudulent accusations and I routinely refer work to them and receive referrals from them. I haven't posted about "Editor75" or addressed him directly in years; but when he launches these kinds of attacks, I have no choice but to respond.

It's always a trade off. When you order from an essay company, nobody really "assigns" the project to anybody at any company with which I'm familiar, regardless of what their websites imply (or say, outright). The order just goes up onto a virtual bulletin board and whichever writer (out of hundreds of writers) grabs the order first takes it. That could be their best and most experienced writer or their newest (or worst) writer taking his or her first assignment for pay before he gets fired a week later for terrible writing or plagiarism. You can "request" the writer of your choice, but in my experience, if that writer declines your request, the order just goes right up on the board and becomes available to every other writer on a first-come/first-served basis and without anybody ever checking with the customer, first. In fact, I was the writer who got the company for which I did the most work to extend the "reservation" period because they were only reserving our requests for 3 hours and we often missed requests that we'd have accepted because they came in while we were sleeping or out. A few of the other top writers and I got into the habit of protecting one another's requests by taking them as soon as they went public, just to hold them for the writer who was actually requested before someone else grabbed them; then, we'd ask Admin to move the order to the right writer's account.

Sometimes, company orders just sit on the board without anybody taking them for many days (or even weeks) and the deadline just comes and goes and eventually, you get a refund from the company if it's an honest enterprise. Admittedly, I haven't written many company assignments in the last 2 years, but I worked for more than a decade for the company widely-acknowledged to be the best of all of the American essay companies, and they had no mechanism whatsoever for letting customers know whether or not their projects had been taken by any writer. Typically, customers would use the message function on the order and that message would never even be seen by anybody, because only the writer who takes an order has access to those messages.

Plenty of times, orders just sat on the board but changed font color to red to indicate that they were already overdue and that the writer should first contact the company before taking them to make sure they're still valid orders. In fact, I used to check the board for frantic company clients who were also forum members, as a courtesy, until I was told to stop doing that. They just wanted to know whether their paid order had ever been taken by any writer. During the busy seasons, there were always (or almost always) several overdue orders sitting on the board that eventually just disappeared, including ones whose specs said that the deadline was "urgent" or "critical."

The company would often increase the payout to encourage writers to take those orders, and sometimes, they would contact me (or one of their other top writers) directly, asking us to take the order. However, in most cases, I declined, and probably for the same reasons that I never took that order in the first place. On the topic of "assigning" orders, once in a while, the company would just add an order to my account after a customer requested me and I would immediately remind the company that, irrespective of whether or not I wanted that particular order, I never wanted anything added to my account by anybody other than me, because that just isn't the nature of our contractual relationship and they removed the orders and stopped doing it after the second or third time. (As independent contractors, all company writers can take or ignore any available order and we're under absolutely no obligation to take any order we don't want. That's the best part of being a freelance independent contractor and not an "employee.")

If we're comparing legit companies and legit freelancers, at least with the latter, you know with certainty that once you pay, the order is actually on a writer's schedule. Most importantly, keep in mind that any "company writer" who is good enough to earn a living doing this is also a "freelance writer" who also takes as much (direct) freelance work as possible. So, if we're discussing legit writers and legit companies, in many cases, we're talking (literally) about some of the same writers. I can tell you that my freelance clients definitely have better access to me than any of my company customers ever had through the essay company's messaging system.


True. My calendar (along with client and emergency backup writer info) is always on my desk and my wife knows the procedure if there's ever an emergency. She knows how to contact my backups (and in the order I've listed them) and how to find all of the project info and any work I've already completed and she knows when and how to contact clients if it's ever necessary. It's never actually happened, but I've had a few close calls in the last decade or so. Every backup writer I have is someone I trust 100% whose work is comparable to mine in quality. Two of them were also among the top writers at the same company to which I referred earlier.

Finally, essay companies have no better access to us than their clients do, except that they know our emails. They don't know us personally and they've never met any of us. There's no physical facility where we writers are all on the premises working together in a big office in writing shifts, although some companies purposely try to imply that's the case. All essay company writers are freelancers writing from our homes. If I break a leg playing hockey today, the company doesn't know anything about it unless or until I contact them to let them know there's a problem with one of my deadlines. Otherwise, the company is just going to be emailing me after they get frantic emails from their customer asking about the project. Of course, being responsible and professional, I'd notify the company ASAP, but that's exactly what I'd do with any freelance project, except I'd be emailing the client directly instead of notifying the company. If anything, my freelance clients would get the news sooner from me than they would getting the same news about their projects from the company.

You can start by using the search function here to do some due diligence by checking the posting history of any writer you might be considering. Just make sure that you change the default "Titles" to "Messages" so your search returns all discussions involving (or about) each writer; otherwise, you'll limit your search returns to threads with the writer in the thread title.

It really shouldn't be that difficult; in my experience, Nursing is one of the fields that generate a tremendous amount of work in this industry. What is it that the writers you mention are telling you that you don't understand?

You should definitely name the writer, especially if you found the person here, for the benefit of all other potential customers and all legitimate writers with whom this person competes.


Those all sound like empty and/or nonsensical threats. No matter what happened, it's not a "police" matter and if you never received any work, there's no issue with your school, especially since you said you never identified the school, anyway. Ironically, the only thing even close to being a police matter might be extortion if the person took your money and is now threatening you for trying to recover it through legal channels after you never received the work. Finally if the essay is already written (and is capable of being mailed or hand-delivered), the writer would have just emailed it to you in the first place and there would never have been any problem. So, why didn't you just tell the writer that if he/she emails it to you, you'll withdraw the dispute?

That would be a ridiculous argument. Copyright is fully transferrable (whether for value or gratuitously) just like most other forms of tangible and intangible personal property. In fact, even totally legitimate essay companies put an explicit clause right in their contracts with freelancers whereby writers agree to transfer their copyright in their work to the essay company. Some states do prohibit knowingly providing work that the customer intends to submit for academic credit, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright ownership or transferability.

We're not permitted to exchange email addresses here but you can check the Recommended Services thread.

In my opinion, it's highly unlikely that a genuine customer would ever take the time and trouble to type out such a detailed post, complete with a breakdown of the company's price scale and instructions for submitting orders and project materials. I believe the post reads much more like it was written by someone affiliated with the company pretending to be a satisfied customer.

Nor do they have to concern themselves with earning and maintaining a steady clientele of satisfied customers and word-of-mouth referrals. They just have to boost their Google rankings by hook and by crook to dupe an endless supply of first-time/last-time customers with a slick-looking website.

Welcome. Building up a steady client base takes time and is largely based on word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied return customers. Generally, the fact that PayPal now covers virtual goods for American customers too isn't a significant factor if you provide good work. If anything, it's helpful to legit writers because American customers know they're now protected against some of the types of fraud to which they were previously much more vulnerable than some of their overseas counterparts using PayPal.

Google his email address and his name if he provides it to you. Use the search function here as well, but change the default from "titles" to "messages." More generally, always try out any new writer or company with a small order first and leave yourself a cushion to do the assignment in time for your deadline just in case you end up getting something unusable (or nothing) from the writer.