In my opinion, the only thing you're likely to learn from that approach is why AI can't be trusted to generate even a halfway decent academic essay.

As I mentioned in another thread, writers who have been doing this long (and well) enough to have cultivated a large clientele still have a lot of work from the goodwill they've established over many years, notwithstanding the AI threat. However, this would be the wrong time to think about starting out in this line of work for the first time.

Unfortunately, it always seems like there are more students who start searching for info about legitimacy after their first experience being ripped off than students who read these kinds of forums before they ever place an order.

Generally, legit writers never initiate "cold" contact with students to solicit business via social media. Your best bet is to ignore anybody who does, whether in this industry or in any other industry.

I believe the main way that AI has changed things is that it's now only that much harder for customers to protect themselves from getting ripped off. The availability of AI programs has now made it even easier (and much more likely) for totally unqualified writers -- whether they're independent or working for essay companies -- to take on projects far beyond their ability to produce at the level expected by customers paying a premium for their services. Previously, customers only had to worry about plagiarism; now they also have to worry about writers providing AI-generated content, which customers could obviously produce themselves for free, if they really thought that AI-generated projects were reliable for academic projects, which they aren't.

At most, essay companies can establish policies against plagiarism and AI, but they can't really control what their writers will actually do. Legit companies will fire writers caught using either one, but more often than not, the way plagiarism and AI use come to their attention in the first place is through complaints from customers on the receiving end of those projects. Unfortunately, even if they offer full refunds, by that time, it's usually too late for those customers to make their deadlines unless they had the foresight to allow themselves a substantial deadline cushion.


Highly experienced writers, whether they write for companies or independently, are unlikely to resort to plagiarism or AI. We got into this business, in the first place, because writing comes so naturally to us and it's what we do well. The risk of receiving plagiarized or AI-generated projects skyrockets, from near-zero probability when you're dealing with very experienced writers, to a very high probability anytime customers deal with newer writers, and, in the case of AI, especially writers who just started doing this kind of work within the last few years.

Coincidentally, in my previous post in another thread (about the current state of this industry), I was going to use the example of going into typewriter sales at the end of the 20th Century to make the point about why someone trying to enter this business now, for the first time, isn't likely to find much work worth taking.

I think the only writers who haven't suffered too much since the introduction of AI are those of us who already established a large client base of regular customers. However, for anybody thinking of trying to start building a clientele now, for the first time, that's probably a very steep uphill battle that no new writer is likely to win.

I know one well established independent writer who is starting nursing school. After having written 1,000+ Nursing projects (as most of us have if we've been doing this work for many years), he figured that he already has much less to learn than the typical Nursing student.

Respectfully, I highly doubt that any academic institution would ever consider allowing, let alone facilitate or encourage, in any way, the use of professional academic writers by students. With the sole exception of the approved use of "editors" by PhD candidates writing dissertations, all academic institutions strictly prohibit students from ever submitting anything they haven't written entirely themselves; most of them expressly include that in their honor codes, and many assignments come with explicit statements -- that sometimes require their signatures -- attesting to the fact that their submissions consists entirely of their own work.

I don't ask my clients (or have any way of knowing) how they ultimately choose to use my work, even if it is intended just as a model for their own writing efforts; but I'm sure that the only kind of writing assistance ever allowed by colleges and universities is the kind available from the writing labs that they typically maintain, for exactly that purpose. Nowadays, even the use of AI programs is often expressly prohibited. Allowing students to submit the work of professional writers for credit will always be completely outside the realm of reasonable expectation, in my opinion.

Language translation is definitely something that AI programs already do well; I just wouldn't trust AI to write even a half-decent academic essay.

Commercial essay companies typically maintain rosters of 100+ or 200+ writers, only a very small fraction of whom have actually been doing this type of work as their fulltime job for many years and are very good at it; many of the rest have no more experience writing academic essays than their clients, and a few of them might have just been hired yesterday because they were looking for something in between traditional jobs. Much more often than not, the former also take on as much freelance work as possible, because they don't have to split payments for any of those projects with a company. Some company writers get fired after their first projects, as soon as the company realizes that the "samples" they submitted with their applications couldn't possibly have actually been writen by them. Others get fired for plagiarism shortly after having been hired, or because they're perpetually over-booked, since it's so hard to earn the equivalent of any decent regular job relying exclusively on projects from essay companies, and they get caught taking shortcuts like plagiarism, recycling, or using AI. Still others are just wildly unrealistic about what topics and/or levels of education they can handle competently. Most companies post all of their available projects on a secure virtual bulletin board, from which any of their hundreds of writers can just grab whatever projects they want on a first-come/first-served basis. That means your results depend substantially and very directly on which of those hundreds of writers happens to grab your project off the assignment board.

I've known one academic writer with a PhD, a few others who were only a dissertation away from their PhDs, and one practicing attorney; but in general, I agree with the above post.

I don't know that ESL students are, necessarily, any worse than NES students at doing research, or even at writing persuasively in their native language. However, what's always very obvious to me is that when they try to write in English, they seem to end up writing a lot of nonsense, probably because the added language difficulty makes it too hard for them to translate what might be worthwhile thoughts into good English. The result is the same kind of empty fluff and extremely awkward use of vocabulary, sentence structure, and (especially) idioms reflected throughout Post #5 in this thread, which provides a perfect example. Admittedly, I don't know how much of the problem with the substantive content relates to writing in English and how much of it is simply a function of its author simply not really knowing anything about writing (irrespective of language fluency).

Usually, whenever someone's first post on this forum presumes to provide so much unsolicited "advice" about writing, it always reads like absolute BS from someone who actually has no clue about the writing process and is basically just trying to pretend that he's already an experienced writer by detailing the way he imagines professional academic writers work. Anybody who really does have many years of experience doing this for a living would immediately recognize that whoever wrote that doesn't know what he's talking about...in any language.

Paying for a large project in installments is perfectly fine, as long as every installment is paid in advance at the time it's ordered, just like any other project. In the last year, I had three 100-pg+ projects that were all ordered 15 or 20 pages at a time: Cognitive Psychology, Emergency Management, and English Literature. I also had maybe half a dozen new clients order just 5-pg Introductions or 10-pg Literature Reviews (etc.) to check out my work before paying for 20 or 30 or 50-pg projects. I have no problem with any of that.

In 20+ years of writing projects for thousands of students, I've had a grand total of exactly ONE student who did actually ask me for help learning how to write. He ordered 5 or 6 projects of several thousand words, each, with supplemental instructional files about half as long as each project, consisting of a very detailed outine with a narrative breakdown of exactly how I researched and developed each section of the project.

Prospective clients often ask me what grade I can "guarantee"; so I have to explain this to them, because grading is always subjective. Nevertheless, I can still tell them what my confidence level is, and after 20+ years of doing this, I can also indicate whether I can probably do the project at an "A-level," especially for US undergraduate projects.


When I first started taking UK projects about 14 years ago, I wasn't yet familiar with the UK marking system; so when a new client's email started out by informing me that his project had received a 70%, I thought the rest of that email was going to be a complaint, until I read it.

I'm sorry, but that really doesn't sound very sensible to me. Teachers aren't doing their ESL students any favors by ignoring their obvious mistakes, because most of them probably want to learn the language. By refraining from correcting them, what they're doing is allowing their students to build a false sense of confidence, because they'll have no idea that their spoken English is full of mistakes. Instead, the BCA should encourage and provide guidance for teachers about how to communicate constructive criticism in ways that promote learning rather than in ways that might embarrass their students for making understandable and predictable mistakes while learning a difficult new language. Teachers should simply be trained to issue their corrections in appropriate and respectful ways, and maybe to explain to their classes in advance that mistakes are to be expected, that there's no need for shame in that, and that by correcting their English in a learning environment, they're actually sparing them from embarrassing themselves, thinking that their English is much better than it really is when they try to use it in the real world.

Apparently, there will always be enough students who don't do their due diligence before choosing a writer for these kinds of companies to survive, relying substantially on dissapointed first-time/last-time customers.

Only a company that cheats its writers would ever refuse to do this, because writers have absolutely no obligation to provide anything more than whatever the specifications require as of the time they accept any order. Writers have the right to request that the order be taken off of their accounts and reposted if additional specifications come in after they've already accepted the order. About the only exception to that right might be where the original specifications actually include some notice that more specifications would be provided, subsequently, and the writer grabbed the order without waiting for those additional specs to be posted; but even then, any legit company that doesn't abuse its writers would allow the writer to drop the project, as long as that request to drop the order is timely in relation to when the additional specs came in and (to) the due date.

Irrespective of the way they choose to handle the writer's request to drop the project because of additional specs, any legit company would always increase the payout to the writer appropriately, to cover the total amount of work the project actually requires. Whether or not the company notifies the customer that the additional specs require additional payment is its prerogative; but they can't refuse additional pay to the writer if those late specs increase the amount of work required to complete the project. No legitimate company would ever instruct the writer that he was obligated to write twice as much for a single-spaced project whose original length was defined in page numbers or write an extra page just because a late message came in from the customer about an abstract, or indicating the abstract in the original specs would have to be in addition to the number of pages (or words) ordered, originally.*

I encountered these types of situations quite routinely when I wrote for essay companies from 2003 to 2013. Typical changes included late notice that a project whose length was specified by the number of pages (vs. word count) required single spacing*, or that a full-page abstract was required in addition to the number of pages (or words) originally ordered for the project. All I ever had to do was notify the company that the additional specs doubled the length of the project (in the first scenario) or added an additional page to the project (in the second scenario), and the company would immediately change the payout for the project on my screen. How they handled things with the client was entirely up to them, but I assume they simply notified the customer that the additional work required additional payment.

*[That's because double spacing is standard throughout this industry and the TOS of all essay companies also either explain that or detail how many words constitutes a "page."]

To be completely honest, I wouldn't encourage anybody to start doing this kind of work for a living now, in the age of AI. Even if current AI programs can't compete with good human writers, that will likely not continue to be the case indefinitely, as AI evolves and improves. By contrast, the 2020 Pandemic hardly affected my business at all after the first 3 or 4 months of that year.

As a writer for essay companies from 2003 to 2013, I never worked for any that used a bidding process; they just posted all of their orders on a writers' bulletin board, from which any writer could take any project, just by clicking on it. The point is the same, though: customers had no control over which writer chose to take any project. At most, they could "request" me, but if I chose not to take that request within 3 hours, the order would automatically be opened up to all writers. I requested that they extend the exclusivity period to 6 hours, but even that was insufficient if a request for me got posted while I was sleeping. So, a customer who very specifically took the precaution of requesting the same writer whose work he liked might still have one of the company's newest and least experienced (and/or its worst) writer of its 100+ writers grab the project and butcher it. Eventually, the other 3 most-requested writers and I began protecting one another's requests by taking them and then notifying the other writer and the company that we'd added those orders to our accounts just to protect them for the requested writer.

True. Writers at essay companies almost always also try to build up their own private clientele, simultaneously, exactly as I did, until I was eventually able to stop writing for any companies, altogether, in 2013. Because our own personal reputations are more important to us than that of any essay company for which we worked, writers tend to prioritize projects from our private clients over any projects from companies, in several different respects.

I imagine that AI presents a nightmare for essay companies, because in addition to having to worry about their writers plagiarizing, now they also have to worry about them taking other shortcuts, such as by using AI programs.

To the extent that this topic relates to the academic essay industry, nothing has ever had a greater impact than the introduction of plagiarism scanners, starting with turnitin, in 2007. Prior to that, most of this industry consisted of the sale of pre-written essays, with original custom-written essays representing only a small fraction of the business. Plagiarism scanners made pre-written essays unusable, virtually overnight, and were directly responsible for the explosion of demand for original custom-written essays. That demand also made it possible for good writers to earn the equivalent of a decent full-time salary doing this, working from home instead of having to commute to an office, long before remote work was even a thing.

When ChatGPT first came out in 2022, it immediately affected essay companies and freelance writers adversely, because so many students jumped to use it as a free alternative to paying anybody for their essays. It took about a year and a half for students to find out -- the hard way, in the form of D's and F's, as well as accusations of having violated academic honor codes -- that AI can't be relied on for academic essays worth using.

Now, the biggest problem presented by the availability of AI in the context of this industry is that, in addition to the other known risks associated with finding a legitimate honest provider worth using, students also have to worry about "writers" who use AI, themselves. Obviously, the only thing worse than getting an unusably bad free essay by using AI yourself is paying your hard-earned money, just for someone pretending to be a "writer" to use AI to generate that same unusably bad essay, whether in direct transactions with customers or by providing AI-generated work to the essay companies for which they work.

You're welcome.

Another suggestion that often comes up in connection with questions and concerns about various payment options is to request a short free "sample" of the proposed project before payment. Posts # 35 and 39 address that suggestion in detail and explain why it's not even a remotely realistic or practical request, especially if you're dealing with exactly the kind of writer most customers are hoping to find: namely, someone with extensive experience who is already in relatively high demand because of an established reputation of providing good work for many years.

Since there seems to be a renewed interest in the topic of whether writers should ever consider any payment model other than full payment in advance for any amount of work requested, I'll refer readers to this thread. Specifically, it explains exactly why the entire idea of "downpayments," in particular, is totally ridiculous, and not only for writers, but also for customers. (For context, what I'm referring to here is "downpayments" of anything less than the full amount due for whatever amount of work is being ordered, not "downpayments" in the form of partial payment for only as much of a project as is being booked at the time of that payment, which is perfectly fine, and which shouldn't even be called a "downpayment," because it's actually full payment in advance for part of a larger project.)

As I explained in 2020, (true) "downpayments" provide absolutely no safety, whatsoever, for writers, with respect to more work than is fully covered by that payment, and more importantly, (from a customer's perspective), they don't reduce the risk of being ripped off for the entire amount of your "downpayment" versus simply ordering and pre-paying for just an equivalent portion of the same project, first. Finally, even if you do manage to find an honest writer who is willing to accept downpayments to produce the entire project based on your promise to pay the balance due upon completion, you're automatically relegating your important (and expensive) project to a writer who is not very good and/or totally inexperienced and/or extremely desperate for work, because good experienced writers are way too busy ever to deal with the unavoidable risks and headaches inherent in the "downpayment" model.

Instead, simply pay a very experienced and established writer whatever amount of money you'd consider paying an unproven inexperienced writer for a "downpayment," but only for the exact amount of work corresponding to that first payment. On receipt of satisfactory work on that first section, either continue pre-paying for one section at a time or, if you're confident in the writer's work based on that first section, just pay for the rest of the project in advance. Either way, the risk to the customer of losing that first payment is no greater than your risk of losing a "downpayment" on an entire project, but at least you're not limiting yourself to writers desperate enough to agree to provide more work than is fully covered by your first payment. Chances are, you're also much less likely to get ripped off by an established writer with a long history and reputation for good work. That's because legitimate writers never scam customers out of their payments; conversely, offering to take "downpayments" is one of many typical strategies used by crooks in this industry to scam customers.

https://essayscam.org/forum/wc/anybody-works-know-academicexperts-ukraine-530/


The very short answer is that pre-paid installments are never a problem, provided that the customer's final deadline allows for delivery of pre-paid sections instead of simply paying for and receiving the entire project all at once. This is the only workable way for students to exercise caution before risking a large payment to a writer they don't yet know deserves their complete trust and confidence.

For students, there's virtually no risk at all paying in advance, as long as you already know that you're dealing with a legit writer. Conversely, for writers, it always means (at the very least) totally unnecessary and avoidable bookkeeping headaches, (as often as not) wasted time "reminding" customers and/or chasing after late payments, and (unfortunately) the ever-present risk of not being paid at all, even by long-term repeat customers, as I've detailed above (and elsewhere on this forum) several different times.

No writer who isn't completely desperate for work and willing to take a very high risk of not being paid should ever even consider allowing payment after doing the work or (especially) after delivery; nor is there a single legit essay company in existence that has ever allowed this, either.

More broadly, I can't think of any type of goods or services that can be ordered online without pre-payment in full before goods are delivered or work is performed; and there's no reason that ordering essays should be any different. There are numerous ways for prospective first-time clients to conduct their own due diligence to identify legit honest writers, especially if they limit their candidates to writers willing to divulge their real (independently verifiable) identity and location to them in advance.

However, since I've answered each and every one of these questions in tremendous detail more than just a few times in my 17 years on this forum, I'll refer interested readers to this series of my previous answers (in Posts 4, 6, & 10) of this thread for more detailed answers.

Agreed. There's no chance that any essay company really rents commercial office space in that building, or in any other Midtown commercial building in or near Manhattan's Garment District, which is, literally, one of the most expensive commercial office neighborhoods in the world. If they had offices in any century-old commercial building anywhere near Midtown Manhattan, they'd also have 212 landlines corresponding to that address.

Even the largest legitimate American essay companies only rent PO boxes or very small inexpensive commercial office spaces in suburban strip malls, or in the outer borroughs, or in Northern New Jersey, because they're run by a very small handful of actual "employees" and more often than not, mainly just by the principals, themselves. None of them needs (or could ever afford) that kind of high-end commercial office space, because all of their transactions are in the virtual medium, and all of their writers are just independent contractors simply working from home with access to online project bulletin boards.

100% Correct. Large scam essay companies that invest a lot of money into advertising and that solicit students through multiple social media platforms can actually generate consistent revenue from a constant supply of disappointed, ripped off, first-time/last-time customers. Independent writers could never hope to do this successfully, because our entire livelihood depends on our ability to turn the vast majority (and very close to 100%) of our first-time clients into long-term repeat customers. Ideally, we hope that as many of our clients as possible will find us at the very beginning of their academic careers, precisely, because every thrilled client is likely to continue using us regularly for years.


I don't know that he ever actually even tried writing academic essays for a living, at all. Back when I was first alerted to the fact that he'd stolen all of the text for his website from mine, nine years ago, I asked two different clients of mine to contact him for quotes on very simple essays that any (real) academic writer would have grabbed immediately as easy money. He never even responded to either of them. I think he might have created that website for the sole purpose of using it for an online "cover story" to pretend that he had a vocation, so that people Googling his name would find that website and believe that he was a writer and also conclude that he was a fairly smart person to be able to do that, to hide the fact that he was, apparently, just an unemployed idiot running various online funding-campaign scams. (See Post # 6, above.)

Unfortunately for customers, if they receive a totally useless project for their hard-earned money, it's not very much of a consolation that the company might be legit, in general, but very inconsistent and/or unreliable in the quality of its product.

Legit providers allow you to cancel and issue a full refund if you change your mind immediately. Obviously, no company that refuses to allow you to cancel and/or that refuses to refund more than 30% before they could possibly have done any work on the project would ever issue a full refund after they produce and deliver the entire project. They were just trying to buy time for the payment to post and trying to get you to let them deliver the entire project, so that they could justify denying any refund by relying on the terms buried deep in the fine print of their contract and TOS.
They weren't shocked, because they run that same scam all day, every day; that's actually their "business model." Everything described is par for the course and their modus operandi, especially the immediate change from super "helpful" and concerned customer service to nasty threats and blackmail.

Respectfully, I have no idea how this could possibly ever work. For writers, it means there's never such a thing as any deadline longer than 3 days. How could a writer ever possibly manage his own calendar if every project -- whether 5 pages due in a week or 25 pages due in a month -- requires a full draft 3 calendar days after accepting the project? When I wrote for essay companies, I often had a dozen or more project deadlines spread out on my calendar, some of which might not have been due for a week or two; and I had multiple deadlines on the same day as often as not. If I'd have been required to provide a full draft within 3 days, I'd never have taken any project with a due date longer than 3 days.

Even that wouldn't work and wouldn't be remotely fair for writers: What does a writer get paid for writing a 15-page "draft" in 3 days if the customer requests a different writer after receiving it? If the company doesn't rip off the writer by not paying him in full for that 15 pages of writing, how does the company make money if it still has to pay another writer to do the whole project again from scratch? What if the customer doesn't like the draft from the second writer, either? What if a project is due in one or two days? What if a project has a 3-day deadline? The writer can't just write the whole project and deliver it on the third day? He has to deliver a "draft" on or before the third day and then wait around to find to find out whether the customer approved the draft and then scramble to finish the final version in between that customer's approval and the deadline?

How could that system possibly work in any of those situations or ever be remotely fair to writers? Why would something so impractical and inherently flawed and unfair to writers ever be preferable to simply advising new customers to order small portions of larger projects with earlier deadlines, so they'd know whether or not they wanted that writer to provide the entire project for the final deadline? Why leave it up to (let's say) a first-time customer to "approve" a draft written by (let's say) a very experienced writer who has already provided the company with hundreds of good projects over several years? Why not just limit new unproven writers to very short or easy projects and/or projects due in a week or more during a probationary period and maybe only require those writers to submit an earlier draft for internal review by someone experienced at the company, instead of by totally inexperienced clients who might never have even written their own first college essays, yet?

I don't know that I'd necessarily draw any conclusions about whether its writers are ESL from that, but I agree that those perpetual "discount" offers are just another indication that you're probably dealing with a shady company.

That's the first and only red flag that you need. Legit providers don't send unsolicited spam emails.

That's basically par for the course for all scam essay companies.

In 16 years on this forum, I've only known about one essay company with "dissertation" in its name that wasn't a scam.

As a writer, I don't know any professors or any current students (besides my own clients); so everything I know about AI comes from their comments and from articles that I've read on the topic. According to my clients, they learned fairly quickly that AI-generated essays are useless. My only direct experience with AI relates to the quick experiment, that I reported here a few months ago, in which I asked for two autobiographical essays of different lengths from the same AI program. One of them said that I was a 20th-Century "pioneer" in architecture, who was "influenced" by Frank Lloyd Wright; the other said that I was a 20th-Century "innovator" of automotive engineering who was "mentored" by Henry Ford. (I know nothing about architecture and wouldn't even know how to change my own car's oil.) That's about how accurate the information is in most AI-generated essays.

That's exactly why I eventually decided to post links on my website directly to some of my Federal-Government work, so that nobody ever needs to just take my word that I really was a writer/Editor for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General, at 26 Federal Plaza, in New York City.

I continue to be amazed every time someone posts here (obviously) pretending to be a satisfied student/customer but forgets that he selected "Company Representative" on his profile.

Generally, companies that deliver good work also treat their writers well, and the converse is equally true. That's because good writers don't continue writing for companies that treat them badly, which means there's always a very high turnover rate and that most of their writers are untested novices and/or bad writers who can't get hired by a decent company. Prospective customers should avoid companies with legitimate complaints from writers, just as they should (obviously) avoid companies with legitimate complaints from disappointed customers.