Why would someone necessarily have any "better luck" finding a legitimate writer over there when "Recommended Services" is nothing but a paid subscription to a list that's totally open to anybody who wants to pay $10/day (or whatever the price is) for inclusion on it? Let me guess: you paid to be listed there?

There's at least one completely permissible way that the moderators of this forum have provided to enable you to contact writers through this forum. Not everybody's happy about that, but I'm sure you know the old analogy about opinions. In any case, definitely use this forum's search function as a research tool. Just change the default from "thread titles" to "messages" and make sure that you check some of the earliest posts in the posting history (and the previous forum identities while you're at it) of anybody you might be tempted to consider a legitimate source of advice today.

In that case, the fact that you're not already enjoying rectal cancer just on the basis of everything to which you've previously admitted on this forum should be conclusive proof that there's actually no such thing as "karma."

No. Pretending to be some kind of "white knight" is your (latest) gig, not mine. After proudly boasting about how much money you made ripping people off in various industries, admitting to reselling your clients' essays without their permission and without disclosing to new customers that you sold them recycled essays, and after repeatedly proclaiming that certain types of clients "deserve" to get ripped off, you've more recently reinvented yourself here as some kind of industry savior. You're the one spending your time posting all of your online chats with essay company reps and chastising others for violating forum rules at every opportunity to dupe new readers who didn't know you for years here as "RustyIronChains" into believing your more recent masquerade as some sort of "do-gooder" cleaning up this industry for their benefit.


You and I do the same thing for a living but you're dishonest and hypocritical about it. You're here for the exact same reason as every other writer but you pretend otherwise with some laughably stupid BS about messages to your account "going nowhere" and you're the only writer here who simultaneously works in this industry while referring to it as a "cesspit" and proclaiming your utter disdain for clients in need of these kinds of services.


Except for defending myself against your unprovoked attacks, I've ignored all of your posts for years and have never attacked or instigated an argument with you even once. Meanwhile, anybody who reads any thread in which you and I have both posted can confirm very easily that for approximately 4 straight years, you've stalked my posts on any topic and you routinely launch the most vicious attacks against me when there isn't even an argument in the thread; at least as often as not, you've attacked me in threads in which I hadn't even posted yet. You really should take your own advice to "give it a rest" and just get over the fact that you made such a complete fool of yourself arguing with me about the "merits" of lowering the drinking age about 4 years ago. Prior to that, there was no animosity between us whatsoever; since that discussion, you've jumped on (and manufactured) every conceivable opportunity to attack me and to shout what I suspect even you know full well are total lies about me. This below is a perfect example.


1. I had no problem graduating from law school and anybody (including you, probably) who knows my name can easily confirm that by calling 212-431-2100, and asking for the Alumni Affairs Office about my 1989 (evening division) JD degree.

2. I don't think I'm "God's gift" to anything or anybody. I provide a service that my clients appreciate enough that virtually every one of them becomes a long-term repeat customer. As far as "pride" goes, I'm not the one who needed to impress people here by announcing how big his house is, how much money he's made, how much he "doesn't need" to work in this industry, or where his work has been published. All of those types of obnoxious proud claims would be yours and yours alone.

3. I didn't write any "bureaucratic nonsense" for the government. The Inspector General's reports that I wrote resulted directly in the recovery of many millions of dollars of federal taxpayer funds that had been illegally or improperly procured or spent. I don't believe in anything as infantile as "karma" for deeds, but since you obviously do, you should at least recognize that what I did as a Writer/Editor (GS 1082) for the federal government should beget "good karma" not "bad karma." About the only thing I'll admit to being somewhat "proud" of is that my writing was good enough to beat out more than 400 other writers for that job.


A simple comparison of our respective post counts on this forum will document that you spend far more of your life here than I do. I simply provide a service that my clients appreciate enough that virtually every one of them becomes a long-term repeat customer and I advertise my services here in the only two ways that this forum permits. Unlike you, I don't angrily attack and type out complete lies about my competitors here and I maintain a mutually respectful relationship with all of the other legitimate writers I know and routinely refer clients to them and vice-versa, despite the fact that we're often competitors for the same business.

Negative. He first emailed me in the early afternoon Thursday and I replied within the hour with a 1-pg test assignment and told him he had 48 hours to get it back to me. The next I heard from him was Monday morning when he said he was "working" on it. I responded (again, within an hour) that he shouldn't bother because "48 hours" means 48 hours and not 72 or 96 hours and that I'd already written it myself. No response to that email either until he sent me a page of gibberish another 6 hours later.

(Any idea why quotes inserted properly into posts aren't appearing?)

I didn't make up the assignment or the page count. It was an actual assignment already on my schedule that I had no problem writing in about half an hour. Since reading comprehension obviously isn't your strong suit:



I'd have paid him for the sample if it had been any good and I'd have kept his email in case of an emergency, as I explained. Part of being a responsible freelance writer is always making sure that you have coverage in the event of unanticipated problems or emergencies. I've sent work to Professor Verb that way a couple of times over the years as well because I know I can trust his work, but I don't "employ" him. Similarly, at least 3 other writers on this forum have asked me to bail them out with deadlines in the past and they don't "employ" me, either.


If you weren't still so blinded by your rage and hatred of me for helping you embarrass yourself here a few years ago, you might also have noticed that I said he contacted me totally unsolicited.

For any new forum readers who want to know this guy "Editor75's" full history before he reinvented himself as some kind of champion of ethics, forum rules, and professional legitimacy, just search for his old screen name "RustyIronChains" and his hundreds of posts where he proudly boasted about ripping people off left and right in several different industries and got busted lying about all sorts of other things. He stalks my posts like a psychopath ever since he made a fool of himself arguing that drunk driving is a "skill" that should be learned early and that it would be smart to lower the drinking age.

You'd think that would be the most natural way for new writers and new essay companies to find one another. Instead, I'm always getting unsolicited emails from writers supposedly looking for work and from new essay companies looking for writers. The companies usually pretend to be customers at first until I request the details of a specific assignment to quote a price. The writers usually can't even compose a coherent email.

Last week, I got an email from another Kenyan writer that was better than most and he provided his full ID and educational history. I don't "employ" any other writers, but it's always good to have a few reliable backup options in case of emergencies. Since I happened to have a very simple 1-pg project scheduled for today, I gave him the specs last Thursday with a 48-hour deadline and told him I'd take a look at his work, pay for it if it was good, and consider him for future emergencies. The deadline came and went with nothing from him. Today, closer to 96 hours than to the 48 hours I gave him as a deadline on Thursday, I received an email saying "am working on the paper ASAP." Obviously, I told him not to bother because I already wrote it and further emails from him are going to be deleted unread. I have no idea whether he was trying some sort of scam, but if someone can't produce a single page of writing in 48 hours, he isn't cut out to write for a living. The test project I gave him should have taken about 30 minutes, or maybe twice that if he's new to doing this.

So, about 6 hours after I told this guy not to bother sending me anything 2 days late, I received an atrociously-written essay of (mostly) gibberish. Since I told him not to bother emailing me again, I notice that my Spam folder is filling up with emails from him marked "urgent." Some gems from his essay about strategic audits specifically in relation to tying together 5 listed business disciplines (which he totally ignored other than saying that 3 of them are "equally important" and that the other 2 are "crucial"):

"In most cases, audits are conducted to gather information on different parameters of the company as its financial position."

"As mentioned earlier, a strategic audit is a masterpiece in any business."

"In any management area, strategic audits champion for emphasis on the key areas and critical issues like the company's future operations and success."

"It majorly contributes to the success of companies. It combines different business disciplines as it is a factor to success."

One other variable that I wasn't quick enough to add before the post-editing timer expired on me is the timing of the cancellation in relation to the payment and the deadline. If a client pays for a project due in a week or two and then decides to cancel that same day or the very next day, the writer should just issue a full refund for it unless he's already actually started on it, which is unlikely. That's obviously not the case for rush deadlines or longer deadlines where the client wants to cancel anywhere close to the deadline and/or not much closer to the payment date than the deadline.

No. If you're totally dissatisfied with the quality of the product, a credit is worthless for the same reason that you wouldn't want a "credit" for another meal at a restaurant in compensation for a meal that you thought was disgusting. A credit from a writer or essay company is only worth something if you already know that you're usually happy with their work in the first place and that you'll be using them again. Once in a while, a project with flexible original specs about length ends up coming out to fewer pages than originally anticipated, quoted, and paid for, in which case I'll offer the client the choice between a future credit for the shortfall and a pro-rata refund and they usually just take a credit, but it should always be the client's choice if the issue arises because of the writer. I just had one of those a few days ago: it was supposed to be 5 pages for 3 admissions essays that only came out to 4 pages because that was the most I could possibly get out of the info provided by the client without fluffing it up just to make the full word count. It was a new client and he chose the partial refund for the last page, possibly just to see whether I'd really issue it, which I did, immediately.

Conversely, if the client cancels for reasons totally unrelated to any fault of the writer (like dropping the course or something), then it's the writer's option to refund it or just offer a future credit, depending largely on whether the writer turned away other work in the meantime because of that project, or where the writer has already changed around other plans or inconvenienced himself to fit it in. If the writer has actually started work on the project by the time it's cancelled (including "just" the research for it), then the writer's only obligation is to offer a future credit for however much of the time needed for the project hasn't already been spent on it by the writer. The general rule should be that the person whose "fault" the cancellation (or other problem) isn't gets the choice between a credit and a refund.

I'm not purposely trying to insult you, but you just don't speak English well enough to offer to write for anybody in English, at least not to anybody except others whose ESL skills are about the same as yours. You speak English well enough to have a basic conversation in which a NLS should be able to figure out what you're saying, but your command of the language is what we'd consider to be "broken English." It is completely inconceivable to me that you could possibly have written essays in Business Management about which any non-ESL client wouldn't have complained about (or spent a lot of time fixing) your English grammar and vocabulary choices and use of idioms, articles, and tenses.

I don't know why so many scam essay services are Ukrainian, in particular, but I assume it has something to do with the fact that all types of online scams typically crop up wherever the local economy is in trouble and wherever legitimate work opportunities are scarce.

But the reason that the people creating all those fake services don't establish legitimate writing (and other online) services instead is that they involve two entirely different business models, skill sets, and personnel.

The business model of legitimate writing (and other) online services emphasizes providing quality work and establishing long-term repeat customers They need to recruit (and vet) dozens of good writers and invest in infrastructure to support automated order processing and hire good customer service teams. The business model of scammers is the exact opposite: namely, to scam as many first-time/last-time victims as possible.

They need nothing more than a phony website that processes orders and a few scumbags to reel in their victims and then frustrate (or threaten) them into dropping their complaints or chargeback attempts after being ripped off.

Legitimate essay service providers have to specialize in writing projects, but chances are that the entities behind scam essay service providers simultaneously operate similar scams in many different industries and hardly limit themselves to just fake essay companies.

I private-messaged the OP and it turns out that I know the writer involved. About a year or two ago, I gave her one or two very short test projects in case I ever needed someone trustworthy in an emergency situation. I believe the first one was fine but the deadline came and went for the second one and I received nothing from her and no response to my emails. Luckily, I left myself a safety cushion so I could write it myself if there was any kind of problem. A few days later, she emailed to apologize and explained that there was an emergency situation involving someone being arrested at an airport or something like that. She's legit in so far as being an honest service provider but I decided not to use her again after that experience. So, I assume she'll be in touch as soon as whatever's going on with her this time is resolved.

Based on the fact that you've used the person before, the most likely scenario is something totally beyond his or her control, like an Internet outage or some other kind of emergency. I know AOL seems to be down right now, which would explain things if the person uses AOL. I use AOL primarily but I also have another ISP and I've learned not to rely solely on my main email to store email addresses so that I can contact people and send files in the event that an AOL outage jeopardizes a deadline. Your writer may not have your email stored anywhere else. It's highly unlikely that any legitimate writer would just suddenly disappear with your money. None of that helps you meet your deadline, but if you made clear that last night was your absolute deadline, he or she will probably offer a fair refund as soon as you're back in touch.

Correct. The same is equally true of all of the essay-company writers at every essay company I've ever worked for, including the largest and most successful legitimate American essay companies in existence: we're all just freelancers working from our homes. I know of no essay company that actually employs any on-site writers. They all just provide an online portal that functions exactly like a bulletin board: the available company orders all get listed on a secure website to which all of us writers have access, and we just take the orders by clicking the right tabs on a first-come/first-served basis.

The companies never actually meet any of their writers in person (even those of us who have been working for them for more than a decade) and the only way any of us writers knows any other writers is through forums like this one where some of us happen to use the same ID as our essay-company writer ID, because the companies don't provide any of our emails to one another, even when we ask. At most, they'll sometimes relay a message the same way they relay messages between us and customers without ever divulging our identity or contact information. I imagine they probably just don't want us sharing any information about our respective pay rates or about our experiences with their customer-service teams.

Generally, we freelancers are all the exact same writers who are also simultaneously employed by essay companies and whether we get assignments through the companies or independently, we're all just working from our own homes. There's nothing necessarily "wrong" with that but customers who imagine that essay companies employ fulltime on-site writers all working at the offices of those essay companies are picturing something that simply does not exist, at least to my knowledge and to the knowledge of every other legitimate freelance writer also working for essay companies simultaneously.

Giving your writer your credentials to access your school's systems is never a good idea. They can track the IP addresses of users anytime they want to and it's tough to explain why someone hundreds or thousands of miles from you was retrieving research for your projects, especially at a time when you were also using the system from somewhere else and/or while you were physically present on campus. Just download all the materials yourself and send them to your writer as files. Your privacy is worth that relatively minor effort.

A standard double-spaced page of 275-300 words is about 1,500 to 1,700 characters (not including spaces), so the price listed is actually a per-page price (approximately) and not a "document" price.

More importantly, the quality of the rewritten work depends entirely on the writing ability of the service provider. If the service provider is as good a writer as many of the "writers" trying to make a living in this business, your results will be very disappointing because the product will read no better than anything else a lousy writer can produce. Furthermore, entirely rewriting existing material can be harder to do well than writing it from scratch because it requires the rewriter to understand and interpret the original meaning of every sentence very accurately, which involves another skill besides just writing and leaves tremendous room for error. Finally, there's a very good chance this service relies entirely on software without providing any actual manual rewriting, in which case your results will almost certainly be terrible and a total waste of money.

I don't know anything about the company, but it really depends on what you mean by "didn't follow the requirements." If that means the specs you provided explicitly required a discussion of 3 sociological theorists and 2 pages per theorist (for example) and strict APA format and only academic journals published since 2005 as sources, but the paper you got was all only about 1 or 2 theorists in MLA and used old textbook sources, then your rewrite should be free to fix everything that obviously should have been done correctly as per your specs in the first place. You should also get at least an apology and maybe some money back if it caused you to miss a deadline.

But if you mean your subjective interpretation of the specs is different from the writer's and (especially) if you mean you actually turned in a paper that you thought was perfectly fine but about which your professor had some criticism, that's a very different situation. (I'm not commenting either way on how you should or shouldn't be using the product, but that kind of thing does happen sometimes, even with work provided by the best essay companies whose TOS prohibit customers from using the work that way. Some companies say they won't touch work that's already been submitted but in my experience, they may just have to say that publicly while quietly assigning the work back to the writer to fix it.)

In principle, writers are responsible to fix anything that's their mistake; but if you just have a different opinion about how the specs that are less mutually clear should have been followed or a different opinion (after the fact) about how you might have written the project that you paid someone else to write instead, and without explaining your preferred approach in advance, then the rewrite shouldn't be free but should be charged at a reasonable and fair rate because the writer didn't actually do anything wrong. Again, I don't know the company or what kinds of promises they make during that 7-day revision or amendment period. I have experienced both extremes (1. having to redo an entire project for free because I misunderstood the specs or used the wrong sources and 2. having clients come back to me a month or more later demanding more work to accommodate every comment from a professor who just gave the essay they submitted a B+ instead of an A). Mistakes can happen, especially to the most established writers who are busy night and day with overlapping deadlines for half a dozen customers. It's a lot of pressure and room for error, but in principle, writers should always fix their outright mistakes that could or should not have been done wrong in the first place for free and charge reasonably for other changes or edits afterwards that weren't mistakes. Sometimes, the customer is the one responsible for leaving out part of the specs, in which case, that's a paid rewrite because it isn't the writer's fault at all. Does that make sense to you?

Not sure how much detail you're willing to share, but to know what's appropriate or inappropriate, we'd need to see the original specs and at least the parts that you say are deficient.

Language "fluency" still leaves a whole lot of room for idiosyncrasies and colloquialisms that differentiate your written "voice" from others. The simplest example would be that UK English is often identifiable from US English in writing, even without focusing on spelling differences. Americans (for whom English is also our official language) are notorious for colloquialisms (many of which are grammatically incorrect) that make our writing easily identifiable as American English. ESLs can be as "fluent" in English as many Americans but they often have their own colloquialisms (or outright characteristic mistakes) that are the equivalent of an ESL "accent" in their writing that makes it immediately obvious the writer wasn't an American. ESLs often use idioms wrong or just differently than Americans, or they develop their own idioms that aren't necessarily technically "wrong," but they're immediately identifiable as non-American simply because Americans don't use them. In fact, ESL writing is also sometimes identifiable by instances of correct grammar in certain situations where Americans typically use incorrect grammar. One example that comes to mind is the correct use of the word whomever. Much more often, ESLs make characteristic mistakes such as adding unnecessary articles and leaving out necessary ones in ways that Americans simply never do, even when they aren't particularly good writers.

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It probably depends on whether the writer does this full time and as a permanent occupation or only part time and/or just temporarily in between traditional jobs. I get emails from old clients all the time asking me whether I'm "still" writing essays and I always have to respond by telling them that I'm not retiring anytime soon and that they should just send me their future project details without the preliminary inquiry about whether or not I'm still available, even if it's been a few years since our last collaboration.


The same is true when it comes to writers at essay companies, mainly because many of us career academic writers continue taking some company orders even after we eventually transition to much more freelance writing. I can only speak from my experience because different companies probably have different systems, but the only way customers can contact us is through a screen linked to their pending or recently-completed projects. I believe they used to be able to go back to previously-completed projects indefinitely if they kept their passwords, but more recently, I believe the company imposed a limit on how long those customer credentials continue to work after delivered projects. In that case, you'd have to see whether your writer is still listed on the drop-down list of preferred writers or, if the company doesn't use drop-down lists, just contact customer service before placing your order to ask whether your writer is still working for them.

It probably depends on many factors: what you consider "good money," how well you write, and what volume you think you can handle, for example. It took me about 4 years of doing this fulltime to go from 90% of my work coming through essay companies and 10% coming from direct clients to reversing that ratio and to earn more than a pretty good federal government job as a Writer/Editor.


No idea what this means.


Essays are a lot like pizza pies in some important respects: you don't usually cook them until they're ordered. If you mean how long does it take to sell a pre-written essay, that market is about as strong as the market for selling your leftover pizza slices.


Generally, the topic is much less important than the level of education and the deadline. Other than that, technical subjects usually pay better than non-technical subjects. No offense intended, but judging from your English usage, you're only going to be doing writing for other ESLs, which usually pays a lot less than writing for American and British customers.


If you mean what happens if you don't receive anything for your money, you're probably safest with PayPal or a major credit card; if you mean disputing the quality of a pre-written essay that you had hoped to resell, your English really isn't good enough to convince anybody at PayPal or any major credit card company that an English essay isn't "good enough" (or whatever)for you. Again, no offense intended.


If there's no market for selling pre-written essays, how advisable or profitable do you imagine it really will be to purchase them at retail prices and then try to resell them at a profit? Back to the pizza pie analogy.

As far as the website you mentioned goes, I checked one of their samples very quickly: Identity in the American Popular Culture. It's not good and was almost certainly written by an ESL writer because whoever wrote it doesn't know how to use certain English idioms, (just like you, actually), and seems not to really know when articles (like "the") are absolutely necessary or totally unnecessary.

Assuming only that part of what makes writers legitimate in the first place is (1) honesty in declining projects above their level in any area and (2) enough self-awareness to be realistic about their abilities, you don't necessarily need to ask about experiences with biology topics in particular, at least for undergrad material. It shouldn't be too hard finding decent writers who can handle undergraduate biology projects, especially biology for non-majors. On the other hand, it might be a lot tougher finding someone who can handle post-grad projects. If that's what you need, it's probably a good idea to commission only a small section (like an introduction) before you trust anybody with a much larger section. Asking to see a sample of post-grad work in the same field is reasonable, but keep in mind you never really know for sure that the writer you're considering actually wrote whatever you receive as a "sample."

Other than having the owner of an essay company waste my time giving me the runaround for months promising to pay me an outstanding $1750, I guess it would have to be having to write a pretty long paper for free after accidentally writing about the wrong topic.

If you're good at this, it shouldn't take anywhere close to even one decade to build a decent reputation, let alone "decades." If you're one of the better writers working for a company, your customers will start requesting you almost immediately. As for freelancing, just about every customer you find should become a regular after the very first project, so all you need to get established is about a dozen or two dozen satisfied customers in your first year or two. New customers should always trickle in faster than your existing customers graduate just based on word-of-mouth referrals or just a very little bit of periodic advertising. If someone can't earn repeat business from as few as 1 or 2 new customers a month, this might not be the right occupation.

I've had people obviously posing as prospective clients approach me several different times when it was pretty obvious that they were trying to be a middleman while pretending to a student that they were the writers. Usually, they also asked for some work first promising to pay afterwards. They probably took money from a real client up front and had no intention of paying the actual writer after the fact. They'd probably have used whatever work they got for free that way from writers desperate enough for work to agree to payment after delivery to convince the client that they were legit and then they'd have just pocketed the pre-payment for the whole assignment after gaining their trust based on the free work from the desperate writer.

There's really only one way to protect yourself from being ripped off as a writer: never even schedule a project (let alone actually write it) until it's paid in full. No exceptions.

Tell your prospective clients that they can try you out for a very short project or just pay you for the first few pages (or one small section) of a larger project before they trust you with a larger payment in advance. If they wait until the very last minute to order a much bigger project, they don't have those options but don't let anybody try to make that your problem because it isn't.

I always tell them there's no pressure whatsoever to use me and that if prepayment in full is a problem, maybe they should just try me another time when they have a shorter project and/or a longer deadline. I'd rather just pass on a project than ever write anything that I can't be sure will be paid.

Clients can always mitigate their risk of getting ripped off by trying out any new writer or essay company with just a few pages, but if they insist on receiving the work before it's paid in full, they're pretty much excluding the most experienced writers who already have way too much regular work to bother taking any risk whatsoever about being paid for their work.

It's the client's prerogative (and their problem) if they're just not comfortable risking prepayment for a couple of pages.

Once you've furnished the work, there's really nothing much you can do to force someone to pay you other than letting them know that whatever they didn't pay for still belongs to you and that you have the right to post it on-line so that it can't really be used without getting flagged by anti-plagiarism scans.

Yeah, but they might not have checked here yet because now they're saying they paid from another email despite the fact that I have no payments from anybody in GBP for the whole month (let alone just on the date of the "notice"), nothing from that other email either, and PayPal already confirmed that the original "notice" email supposedly from PayPal was fake.

Just a question for the forum moderators:

Why the need to edit the title that I chose for this thread to substitute your choice of wording instead? The original title violated no rules; it referred to no individual or group; it reflected exactly the tone that I chose; and if I wanted to express myself using the word "customers" sarcastically like that (or to make it more inflammatory), I could have worded it that way myself in the first place. I'm not contesting that your TOS give you the right to edit posts as you see fit, but nobody who writes for a living appreciates having his written expressions edited arbitrarily like that.

It really depends on facts that aren't clear from your question. What does "didn't feel right" mean? And what does "things got really dodgy" mean?

If you changed your mind about ordering it shortly afterwards and wanted to cancel it long before the work was produced, they're just extortionists. They're not really obligated to refund it and changing your mind isn't a valid reason to do a chargeback, but depending on the relevant dates, they should refund it just from the perspective of establishing goodwill with a customer.

The reasonableness of your change of mind depends very much on when you placed the order, when it was due, and when you decided to cancel. If it was for an order due in a month and you asked to cancel the day after ordering, they should have refunded it completely. If it was a rush order or you asked to cancel a longer-term order only a few days before the due date, then you can't demand any refund. You can ask but they're not wrong to refuse.

If you mean they actually sent you the essay, then your complaint that it "didn't feel right" isn't a valid basis for demanding a refund at all.

If you want a better answer, tell us exactly what happened.

Time involved is the principal determinant of my price. Free thinking and creativity come easily enough to me that I don't charge extra for it; in fact, the more free thinking and creativity a project emphasizes or encourages the less I'm likely to charge.

The only part of Australian and UK education programs to which I've had any exposure has been their written assignments. Every assignment that I've taken from a student in an Australian or UK program has been more demanding in just about every aspect, from the way it was framed initially to the requirements and grading criteria. Written assignments that are good for a solid B in the U.S. might barely pass in Australian programs, and work that's typically an easy A here earns nothing close to that without a lot of improvement. That's why I always err on the safe side taking on their work in the first place and that's the only reason that I do charge more for both Australian and British programs if I take the work. They both typically require much more time and effort for topics that I can ordinarily write for U.S. clients easily and with very good results based on their feedback and gratitude.

In my opinion, that price would only be appropriate if the work needed such extensive editing and revision that it's as much work as writing it all from scratch. That is often the case, but if all it needs are minor revisions and corrections, that's very expensive and about what you should expect to pay for the whole thing written by them instead of you. I'd also be very hesitant to send a full draft to any entity you haven't already vetted thoroughly, because once they have it, you're pretty much trusting them not to just sell your work to someone else or extort you for money. As is the case anytime you're considering any new writer or essay company, you should try to test them out first, such as by paying them to edit only 1 page before you trust them enough to send them your whole project draft.

Agreed. Also use the search function to check their long-term posting history by user name. Make sure to change the default setting from searching just thread titles to searching the entire content of posts.

I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous. Nobody who does this for a fulltime living and who's spent a decade or more establishing a reputation for reliability and honesty would ever jeopardize that reputation out of laziness. If anything, it's new writers "exploring" this occupation with little or nothing to lose and without enough experience to know exactly what projects they can and can't complete who might be tempted to cheat their customers by taking shortcuts. If anything, it's precisely backwards: the longer you've been doing this and the more established your reputation the less you'd ever want to do anything to risk it.

Just out of curiosity, how long have you actually been running your writing agency and in what country?

Like anything else people do for a living, someone with many years of experience writing (literally) thousands of essays is likely to be much better at this than someone who has never done it for a living before. Why would stating how much experience they have necessarily amount to "bragging"? What would you prefer a highly-experienced writer do besides describing his or her level of experience accurately? Lie to you and pretend not to be quite as experienced just so you don't think it's "bragging"?


Your implication here is that anybody who managed to complete any college or university degree in any field is necessarily qualified to write academic essays (or anything else) professionally. That's not remotely true.

Generally, newly-graduated students don't write all that well and they have little ability to write in areas outside of their academic majors, much less to handle any kind of high volume in very short periods of time. Being a good writer in the first place is certainly more important than how much "experience" someone has, but I can tell you from extensive personal experience as a good writer that doing this at a high level day in and day out and handling multiple overlapping short deadlines is not something that you can do just because you're a good writer.

At most, a good but inexperienced writer new to this business can produce maybe one good relatively short essay in one subject area per day, while also making many of the same mistakes that students on track to graduating typically make in their writing and there's nothing magical that suddenly occurs on receiving a diploma that makes every graduate a better writer than any other student making progress toward graduating. Conversely, a good highly-experienced writer can produce 20+ pages in 4 or 5 or more totally different subject areas in a day, and during the high season, daily. I'd never have been able to do that 10 or 15 years and maybe 6,000 projects ago, notwithstanding that I was always a good writer.

I'd be wary of any essay provider (company or freelancer) that only accepts payment through methods that are anonymous. At least with PayPal, both parties are known to the intermediary and there are some dispute procedures if something goes wrong. If you pay by wire transfer or Western Union (etc.), there's nothing you can do if you get ripped off. In any case, and regardless of payment method, you should always try out any new essay provider with a short project before you go for something more substantial and expensive, if possible.

They search for combinations of words in the work submitted that match the same combinations of words found in sources that are searchable online. They also highlight them and indicate exactly where the same sentences or paragraphs or whatever were found so that whoever is doing the search can go check them. Sometimes, they "flag" combinations of words that have just been written thousands of times, such as "Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939" or "The four functions of management are planning, organizing, directing, and controlling." That type of thing is understood by the users of scanners not to be plagiarism, necessarily, simply because there are only so many ways to word those ideas. What they're really looking for is matches of entire sentences that are much too complex to be explained by coincidence and entire paragraphs lifted from other sources without proper citations and quotation marks. They don't look for similar writing styles; they look for actual matching content (strings of words).

I simply stated my true opinion and I presented my reasoning in objective terms and in substantial detail. In my opinion, Grapho is 100% correct that everybody who bothers to read, register, and post on this forum is either a prospective customer or an essay service provider (in some direct or indirect capacity). In my opinion, the most obvious indication that someone is secretly employed by or has some other undisclosed financial interest in essay companies is that he or she always responds angrily to any suggestion that freelancers might be better bets than companies. Another indication is refusing to give a simple and direct answer to the questions "Are you currently employed by or in any way financially interested in any essay company?" and "Why are you so interested in this particular industry among all of the possible choices of industries in the world (like counterfeit pharmaceutical manufacturers, child sex-slave traffickers, financial investment scammers, exploitative transplant organ recruiters, phony medical service providers, and phony adoption services, for a few examples) where rip offs do so much more harm than even the worst scammer in this industry?" I'd trust anybody who admits why he's here over anybody who doesn't. You're entitled to a different opinion on all of the above. I don't see any reason for anger or nastiness unless, of course, you work for an essay company and can't disclose that.


A. I believe the company that runs this forum could simply state that it reserves the right to vet any prospective advertisers and then make a good-faith attempt to avoid taking ads from any apparent scam companies without any legal problems, as long as they establish standard vetting protocols as suggested by several other forum members.

B. Ironically, by falsely stating that I "almost" graduated from law school anybody who works for or is associated with any essay company that runs this forum would be engaging in anti-competitive practices because you have my full identifying information and would only have to make one quick phone call to New York Law School (212-431-2100) to verify my degree with the Office of Alumni Affairs instead of maliciously making a false statement against a direct competitor.


It's true that customers can request specific writers at many companies. My statement was that I know of no essay company that requires a requested writer to take an order and every essay company I've ever written for makes those orders available to all of the other writers if the requested writer doesn't want it, unless the customer specifies in advance that he wants a refund if the requested writer doesn't take it. Most customers don't even know that some of the "different essay companies" they think they're comparing are all owned by the same company and all use the exact same stable of writers regardless of which of their dozens (or even hundreds) of companies actually takes the order. I couldn't even count how many times I've completed company orders where the note from the customer said something like "I'm ordering from you guys because __________ Company gave me a horrible essay...so I'm hoping you guys are better!!" and they have no idea that it's all the same company and all the same writers.

Isn't your response above one of the best reasons that customers looking for good writing may be safest with freelance writers instead of with any company that maintains hundreds of writers who vary substantially in their relative abilities, experience, and competence? This would seem to be especially true when many of us good writers are the very same writers (even using the same S/N for freelance and company work) and when the search function here can be used by customers to confirm that in posts going back 5 or 6 years? According to your response above, it wouldn't really mean much of anything whether a customer got a horrible essay or a fantastic essay from a company unless he could get a guarantee that his future work will be completed by the same writer (and being able to "request" that writer is hardly the same thing as any guarantee). No essay company that I know ever "assigns" orders to any writer or requires any writer to complete a requested order. I've had requested orders for me added to my account by the company, but with very few exceptions (i.e. an order I'd have been interested in taking), I've always just contacted admin to let them know I wasn't interested in that order and then it was promptly removed from my account and posted for other writers.

Even if customers luck out and manage to get one of us experienced writers the first time, they still have no idea who'll do their next essay at the same company; and even if they request me (or Professor Verb, for example) based on the first essay, if we decline the request, the order goes right back onto the list of orders available to any other writer who grabs it first. At best, the cautious customer can specify that he wants a refund if his requested writer is unavailable, but that just leaves him right back at Square One without a reliable source of good work unless he wants to take his chances all over again and take his chances with a stable of hundreds of anonymous (to him) company writers. It's even worse on some company systems that rely on the honor system for other writers not to grab requests for specific writers and I know of no company that reserves requested orders for the requested writer for more than 3 hours, after which the request simply becomes available to every one of hundreds of other writers.

Conversely, with freelancers, a customer can at least have confidence that the quality of work provided on the first small test order is representative of the quality he'll be getting in the future from that writer. Even in the event a freelancer is so good that he sometimes has "overflow" work, a good freelancer with an established reputation will only give that work to another writer he considers to be an equally reliable peer so there's no drop-off in quality. In my case, for example, I might use Professor Verb in an emergency, precisely because I know the quality of his work and I know that he's no less reliable than I am.

To be fair to the OP, you didn't originally suggest that the way to test one of those advertising sites was to place "100 orders" to identify 1 decent writer at the company being tested. You simply suggested that someone should test the company by placing an order with them, which seems to be exactly what he did. He placed an order and then posted the entire essay right here for others to read and draw their own independent conclusions. He's right that there's something suspicious about why that essay would be removed from the thread on an anti-scam site and without any explanation of how it violated the forum TOS or why it was removed. This might not matter to the company that sells ad space here, because I've only bought ads a few times and just for 1 week at a time, but continuing to sell ad space to any company that lies about its location or that provides low-quality work (if either of those is truly the case) only deters us qualified legitimate writers (and companies) from purchasing future ads right next to theirs.

Eye strain isn't normally an issue for me. A few times a year my eyes bother me and I have to close them for a while, but it doesn't happen very often. Writer's block isn't really an issue: either I can do a particular topic or I can't (and with varying degrees of difficulty), but the writing itself usually isn't a problem.

Ironically, it's sometimes the easiest topics that can be a little hard to stretch out for the number of pages requested because there's just not that many pages of ideas there to squeeze out without repeating yourself. I always manage, but it can take a lot longer than I expected for a simple topic. Feeling as though I've already written just about everything there is to write on the topic is about the closest thing I ever experience to writer's block.

In my opinion, digging ditches and farming from dawn to dusk are fatiguing, not waking up at whatever time you want (usually) and sitting in front of a screen in an air-conditioned room typing words. Admittedly, some projects do force me to remind myself about that, but it's all relative. I've always written well whenever I had to write, but when I was in college (and even when I started doing this for a living), a 10-page essay seemed like a really big deal, especially on short notice. The idea of writing a 10-page essay in one night seemed incredible to me and I was amazed anytime someone said he did that in school. In fact, one of the main reasons I chose law school instead of some other graduate programs was because there was the least amount of writing involved. At least at the time, the only writing you did in any traditional law-school program was on one end-of-term in-class final in every class, one required major written project before graduation, and whatever writing there was in one required Legal Writing class. I hated the idea of multiple tests in every class and (especially) assigned essays. I specifically remember saying that I didn't want to do any graduate school that involved a lot of writing and now that's what I do for a living. Nowadays (and thousands of essays later), I can't even imagine having difficulty writing 10 or 15 pages overnight, at least not by virtue of the length alone. My writing ability hasn't really changed that much, so I guess it's more about practice and perspective.

Now that most of my work is freelance, all-nighters don't happen too often, at least not unexpectedly; when I did much more writing for essay companies, it happened fairly often. Typically, I'd be working on a much larger project due sometime the next day on one screen and short rush company orders and specific rush requests for me that I just couldn't ignore would keep popping up on my other screen all night. I'd grab those orders as they came in, bang them out, and then get back to work on the larger project. During the busy season, there were many nights that I ended up taking and completing 3 or 4 short unplanned rush papers that way and ended up having to work through the night and well into the next morning just to finish the original project that I'd have otherwise finished much earlier. There are still some nights that I end up writing all night, but that's just because I'd rather stay up as long as necessary to finish something than set an alarm clock to get up early to do (or finish) it the next day. The quality of the work isn't affected by any of this, but it can get pretty stressful on my end of things, obviously.