I'd trust this kind of unsolicited email about as much as I'd trust those forum posts from "students" whose very first post on this forum is to announce that they received great work from some essay company.

My guess is that as more and more customers discover how unreliable AI is for this kind of work, more companies are hiring again.

This is almost always the case anytime the content of a post, especially a first-ever post on this forum, doesn't match the designation (Company Rep, Writer, Student, "Observer," etc.) chosen by the poster.

To me, it sounds like Post # 9 was from someone deterred by threat of exposure to his or her educational institution, and Post # 14 is nothing but an obvious advertisement from someone affiliated with the company pretending to offer "helpful advice" to students.

The biggest red flag of the company referenced in the above post is the laughable stupidity that anybody would believe that the "customers" identified in its testimonials would ever have allowed them to publish their full names.

I'd suggest drawing the same conclusion about any essay company whose site immediately and repeatedly bombards visitors with those "chat assistants" whose chat windows continually require visitors to close them just to continue viewing the website without being pressured to place an order.

Apparently, that "legacy" doesn't include the understanding that excellency is a title of nobility or aristocracy that has absolutely nothing to do with excellence.

While I agree that it's definitely very poorly written, I don't see any of the usual obvious evidence of either ESL or AI-generated writing; IMO, it was written either by a bad NES writer who doesn't know punctuation very well or an ESL writer whose spoken English -- but not his or her writing -- is, actually, excellent. Either way, it's a very dangerous site, because I wouldn't expect potential customers to be able to spot the signs of bad writing that are much more obvious to any experienced NES writer. One reason that's such a problem is that essay companies usually use their very best writers to provide the text for their websites, which means the writing on their website is likely to be much better than the writing of the vast majority of their projects.

Exactly. Anybody can call just himself a "writer" and start advertising or otherwise soliciting for clients to "try out" academic writing or to do it temporarily for the first time while they're in between fulltime jobs. There are very few people with the ability to produce a high volume of good academic projects regularly who aren't doing something else for a living, and even fewer who've provided many thousands of projects over 20+ years in this business.

According to some of my returning clients, they've actually learned the hard way why they still can't trust AI programs to produce anything usable.

Great to know.

Agreed. No decent writer would work for an essay company for less than $20 USD/pg; and essay companies typically pay their writers roughly 40-60% of the price charged to their customers for projects. If that math doesn't add up, it means the person writing your project definitely is not located in a first-world country, definitely has zero qualifications, and definitely does not hold an advanced degree -- and probably not even any university degree at all -- in anything, and definitely is not any kind of "expert" or "specialist" in any academic field, regardless of what any website claims.

This perfectly illustrates what I've been saying about all of these "chat assistants" on some essay company websites: They're not there to "assist" you do anything besides issue payment to them ASAP. Once they have your money, their job providing "assistance" is done. Don't be fooled by their upbeat, super-polite, "concerned" attitude before payment, because it's all an act designed to get your confidence and convince you to pay for a project ASAP, and to convert every visitor into a paying customer in their first visit, including (or especially) when you had no intention of making a purchase just yet. All of their phony cheer and "concern" completely vanishes as soon as you try to get them to honor their "guarantees" about revisions and (especially) refunds.

Nobody ever joins this forum just to announce a successful experience with any essay company; students come here for only two reasons: (1) to find a legitimate and trustworthy provider, and (2) to complain about and expose scam providers and/or blackmailers. So, anytime a new member's very first post is to announce how thrilled he is with work supposedly received from a specific company, you can be sure that it's not really a satisfied customer, but someone from that company just pretending to be a customer. The same goes for anybody whose first post on the forum magically appears in the exact same thread to echo the praise of the same company. Sometimes, they first "seed" the ground by creating a new thread with a post pretending to be seeking information, to which all of the subsequent shills respond with recommendations for the company with which all of them are affiliated. Besides the suspicious dates of the posts, themselves, their respective profiles also exhibit equally suspicious dates that multiple supposedly unrelated "customers" all suddenly joined the forum within days of one another and all proceeded directly to chime in with similar praise of the same company in the same thread.

I think it would be substantially more difficult to establish one's self as an independent freelance academic writer now than it was when I managed to do it, almost 15 years ago. However, I don't think many mediocre writers ever consider blackmail as an option. IMO, someone needs to have a criminal mindset to do that, a priori, and there probably aren't too many criminals who try to become academic writers, first. I think it's much more likely that mediocre writers simply move on to different jobs and maybe continue to do whatever academic projects may come their way. Of course, there's a very easy method for customers to protect themselves from any possibility of being blackmailed by any essay provider: Never do business with any writer who will not share his real identity and location that you can confirm independently using online and/or local directories. That's because even someone who does have a criminal mindset knows that blackmail isn't possible if the victim knows exactly who (and where) you are, especially in the U.S., where blackmail is a federal crime.

Good writers strongly dislike having to write resumes, because the work involves much more formatting than actual writing. We find that kind of work annoying and tedious, because there's no real flow to it; we greatly prefer substantive writing that involves writing several paragraphs (or pages) at a time, without interrupting our flow every sentence or two, to go back and forth, constantly, between what we're writing and the information that we need to read and interpret to rephrase from the source document. I don't refuse to write resumes, especially for regular clients, and still find myself doing them fairly often, but I've learned to charge more for them than for substantive writing, because resume word counts just don't correspond fairly to the amount of my time that they take to do well. Naturally, good writers produce much better resumes than bad writers; we just dislike having to do them.

The only thing more oviously fake than those writer "profiles" are the "customer" testimonials on some sites featuring their names and schools, because the last thing that any real customer would ever allow is publicizing their use of essay companies online, to be forever searchable in connection with their names.
Exactly. Thank you.

The OP said that the reason he requested a revision was that the company didn't follow the original specifications, which wouldn't be consistent with the type of revision request necessary to change the essay to resell it.

Anybody can call himself a "writer" and pay someone to create a website and/or just start advertising his services on social media. That's why it's so important for clients to make sure that any writer they're considering is a real person with a long-term online presence on a forum such as this one and whose education and history as a professional writer can be verified independently.

As usual, we're on the same page. That book has been on my shelf since it first came out almost 30 years ago. While it definitely does compare education and career choices, I think the real emphasis is more about what people actually do with their earnings and their spending habits than about how they earn a living. Today, much of it could simply be summed up into the distinction between those people who display their lives on IG and those who don't: Those who don't have a much better chance of accumulating wealth during their working lives, whereas those who do will probaby never accumulate any wealth, even if their salaries are relatively high. It's a great read and full of very solid advice.

I don't necessarily know that one can draw reasonable negative inferences about the intent of an essay company just from the fact that they provide a page-computation/pricing function. However, I do think that it's extremely impractical for conscientious providers to do so, simply because there can be so many other variables that factor into fair pricing, which can't be handled by any automated system. In my opinion, it's a much bigger red flag when you can't even navigate through an essay-company website just to read it without being bombarded by constant pop-ups from "consultants" offering to "help" you and/or offering you discounts that "expire" soon. Their one and only job is to convert every website visitor into a paying customer immediately, and usually, before the visitor is actually ready to make an informed decision to place an order. Those same "expiring" discount offers will be available to every website visitor and don't "expire" unless you place an order immediately.

More often than not, the prettier the website is, the less likely you are to get high-quality work from them.

As always, any kind of money-back "guarantee" should always be considered a huge red flag. It's not that important what specific mechanism(s) they used to refuse to honor their guarantee, this time, but this case illustrates why you'll never win any kind of argument with any of these kinds of companies: First, they ask to see the "marker's feedback sheet" and then they refuse the refund because turning the work in for credit violates their TOS, while also saying that grading is too subjective to be guaranteed. Of course, it's totally true that grading is too subjective for any guarantee, (which is why no legitimate provider ever makes those sorts of guarantees in the first place), but if that's their position, why are they seemingly guaranteeing a specific minimum grade right on their website? Finally, they also "guarantee" free revisions until you're satifsied, but then they refuse to honor a refund request, saying that, according to their TOS, it doesn't apply to any work that they've revised pursuant to that free-revision guarantee.

You might think that simply means you should request your refund if the project needs revisions, instead of asking for those free revisions, but that won't work, either. There actually is a TOS tab at the bottom of their home page, and those TOS illustrate exactly why you can't trust anything about their 2:1-standard guarantee, or for that matter, anything else on their website about "refunds": According to Section 1.5 of their TOS "The customer acknowledges that no refunds will be provided once Essay Writer has allocated a writer to complete the custom essay and the payment has been made." So, none of that other nonsense about revisions or 2:1 marks or about turning in the work for credit even matters, because they're obviously never issuing any refunds for any essay they provide, for any reason, period. It's too late for this particular victim, but this is also exactly why you always need to read (and copy and save) the entire TOS and never just trust any of the other marketing BS on websites just designed to gain your confidence and trust with absolutely false promises and "satisfaction guarantees" that the company has absolutely no intention of ever honoring, regardless of the circumstances.

I don't think so. First, there's no indication from unknown1 that any of this has to do with collecting a legitimate debt owed to the company. To the contrary, according to his only post in this thread, it was a company that scammed him, not a company rightfully owed any money from him. Second, blackmail is a serious crime, making the corporate and/or ownership status of the company and/or whatever website or email system they use to perpetrate it totally irrelevant. Nobody should ever respond to blackmail threats or engage with blackmailers at all. Just block every means by which they try to contact you without replying and immediately report it to law enforcement. Do exactly that and do nothing else, (except preserve the information in case it's needed by law enforcement as evidence).

Also, understand that blackmail is a federal crime, giving the FBI jusrisdiction; so, just contact your local FBI field office about it, regardless of where you are in the U.S. They have the necessary tools to ID your blackmailer, even if you only know the person through an email address and a PayPal ID. While it's only a misdemeanor with a 1-year maximum prison sentence, perpetrating blackmail online makes it an entirely different and much more serious federal crime with prison sentences up to 20 years. That's why you should definitely report it and that's also why knowing the real ID of your U.S.-based writer is an effective safeguard against any possibility of blackmail, because nobody subject to federal criminal jusrisdiction is crazy enough to take that kind of risk with such an obvious electronic trail, especially over the relatively small amounts of money involved in these kinds of transactions.

Just putting this here, because of the relevant thread title:

I've never had any problem answering unique questions, privately. However, I've already posted anything and everything that I have to suggest about what to do and what not to do if you've been blackmailed by any essay company or writer. So, if you contact me privately with questions and I respond indicating that I've already posted public answers to those questions and anything else that I have to suggest about responding to blackmail, please don't continue emailing me similar questions or ask me about "chatting" with me about your situation by phone. The search function here works very well, and all you have to do to find my posts on any subject is enter any term (like "blackmail") into the search field, type my S/N into the field available for limiting search results to the posts of any specific person, and change the default from searching "Topic Titles" to "Messages." If you're too lazy to do that, please don't expect me to spend my time retyping what I've already posted publicly (more than once) on the forum, because your time is not more valuable than mine. And please spare me additional emails asking me about my services and repeating your same questions, thinking that I'm going to give you a different answer, hoping to get your business, because I'm not stupid.

Thank you.

Vocational and technical schools are (obviously) only viable alternatives for those interested in careers that only require that type of training (and/or apprenticeships) in fields where that's the norm. Typically, people who know that they plan on becoming auto mechanics, construction workers, deep-sea crab fisherman, tattoo artists, hair stylists, and plumbers (etc.) aren't the people who consider wasting 4 years and a ton of money going to college, in the first place. At the other end of the spectrum are people who have no choice but college, because they're planning on becoming doctors, lawyers, or engineers, or on pursuing other careers in fields that absolutely require a 4-year degree. The people currently caught in the middle are those who want to pursue careers for which college degrees aren't formally or practically necessary, but are still strongly "preferred" by employers, as well as those who have no real idea yet what career path they might want to pursue, but who want to have as many options as possible and be competitive against other candidates with degrees, especially when good jobs that don't require degrees are relatively scarce. Obviously, qualified without any degree is better than unqualified with a degree, but in almost all cases, qualified with a degree is still much better than qualified without a degree, in almost all careers except those in which vocational or technical training is the traditional pathway.

So, the dilemma about whether or not college is worth the time and expense is almost exclusively a problem of students who just want to have the best chances of getting hired for the types of jobs that don't require formal degrees but where lacking a degree is still a detriment, even if only because of employers' preferences and expectations, rather than because they're actually necessary for vocational competence in the position. Unfortunately, most white-collar jobs require a college degree in a practical sense of being preferred by employers, even if the jobs, themselves, don't actually require a college education to do the work. Like it or not, the fact that a college education is now the "norm" rather than the relative exception that it might have been half a century ago also means that people applying for most white-collar jobs will be much less likely to get their preferred jobs, simply because, rightly or wrongly, they'll be bumping up against a prejudicial assumption that they're less capable or smart or accomplished, just by virtue of not having a college degree, especially when most of the candidates against whom they're competing do have a degree.

This is a simplistic and inappropriately binary analysis of a very complex situation. Even if many of those points are substantially true, the fact of the matter is that not having a college degree is still a tremendous impediment to a successful career track in many occupations, even in fields that don't actually require any knowledge acquired through college education. Until employers stop valuing the degree, it's probably still worth the time, trouble, and expense to acquire one, at least for most people. The exception might be those who already have a very specific occupation in mind in a field where lacking a degree is not a requirement for advancement and success.

The advice is always the same, regardless of how many new emails or phone numbers they use to threaten you: Ignore anything and everything they say, don't respond at all, and immediately block and report each new threat.

According to their website, they charge $13.10 per page, which means their writers work for about $7 or $8/page. That's about all you need to know about the quality you can expect from them.

There's no doubt that AI is great for many different things. Writing anything requiring original thought is just one of the relatively few things for which it's still entirely useless.

Pre-written essays started becoming worthless because of turnitin, about 15 years before the first AI programs ever hit the market, starting in 2007, and became entirely worthless as soon as turnitin (and other plagiarism-detection scanners) became standard throughout higher education. However, unlike pre-written essays, AI-generated essays can't be detected by any scanners, precisely because AI text is entirely original and not copied directly from any source. If you're defining plagiarism more broadly, to include the un-credited use and paraphrasing of ideas, then, yes, AI writing is also substantially plagiarized, because AI writing programs don't formulate substantive ideas of their own. But, as bad as AI writing currently still is, AI-generated text is usually entirely original. Professors now know how to identify it with certainty, but not because the text (itself) is plagiarized.

Generally, "boutique" simply means that a business is smaller and much more specialized than other entities in the same industry. Typically, they provide extra services beyond what their customers get from standard entities but they serve a smaller segment of customers than their standard counterparts. So, a boutique law firm might handle only a very small range of cases within a specialty area, such as only defending criminal DUI charges or only handling the defense of civil medical malpractice claims against doctors; a boutique hotel might cater to fitness enthusiasts and provide a private gym in every suite; and a boutique supermarket might carry only fresh organic foods, etc. While I've never encountered any in this industry, a real "boutique" essay company might handle only Nursing projects or only STEM projects, or specialize only in handling projects for ESL customers, etc.

Back when I used to work for essay companies, I always saw orders that just stayed up on the assignment boards for weeks, remaining there long after their posted deadlines passed, without ever having been taken by any writer, and which eventually got refunded. One of the most common types of these orders were those that obviously required all different sorts of additional extra work that wasn't adequately accounted for by their page count and that made the payout offered to writers for them ridiculous, all because customers were able to place their orders through an automated system whose only variables were level of education, page count, and deadline. Sometimes, they were "2-page" orders paying out $10 or $15/page for projects that required 100+ pages of reading, for just one example.

That's only one of the many reasons that I don't have an automated ordering system on my website, but just an inquiry field for customers to describe and explain their projects to me. There are way too many variables that affect pricing for any automated system to handle orders competently, except for very simple orders. Even when people contact me directly asking me something like "How much for a 4-pg History essay due in 4 days?" my answer is always that I need to see all the information that they have for the project to price it.

The problem for professors isn't that AI is difficult for them to detect; they obviously know it when they see it. The problem for them is the difference between knowing it and being able to prove it, objectively. In general, professors are always extremely careful about accusing students of cheating and/or other honor code violations, because there can be prohibitive consequences for them, if they can't substantiate their accusations. That's why they typically err very much on the safe side and often handle incidents that they knowof but can't prove only informally, such as through warnings or demands to redo assignments, but (intentionally) without any a formal accusation that could actually affect the student's record. However, the AI-detection method that I referenced provides incontrovertible objective proof and doesn't rely on any apps, either. It makes it completely impossible for anyone to argue that the content wasn't AI-generated.

I wouldn't be too optimistic about the quality of anything that costs barely 20% of the standard market rate for that service. As with anything else, you get what you pay for.

Agree 100%.

Besides the terrible quality of AI academic writing, more and more students have been getting caught using AI on assignments that specifically prohibit the use of AI; and, lately, I've been seeing more and more assignment prompts with exactly such warnings. Professors have discovered a few tricks that enable them to confirm AI writing, and without the need for any kind of "scanner." Before coming to me, one new freshman client of mine got caught using AI on his second college essay, along with several classmates, by a very clever professor who came up with a completely novel detection method whose results are100% accurate and impossible to challenge, regardless of which AI program was used.

Thanks, but I wouldn't exactly call it luck. It's simply the long-term result of having provided nothing but excellent work to so many clients for more than 20 years of doing this kind of work. I definitely don't envy any new writers trying to establish themselves now, for the first time, nor do I doubt that traditional "old-school" platforms and methods might not work as well for them. They may have no choice but to swim in the same waters as all of the scammers, much the same way that all of us legitimate writers had to a decade or two ago, online.

I have zero social-media presence, whether personally or professionally. That's mainly because, as a creature of habit who dislikes change unless or until it becomes inevitable and/or unavoidable, I've always been a slow adapter of new technologies, in general. So, the fact that social media is currently completely saturated with scam essay companies actually helps providers like me who still rely exclusively on our websites and on referrals from our loyal customers.

One thing that wouldn't require any financial investment at all would be simply banning new IDs whose posts make it extremely obvious that they're nothing but newly created IDs of people who were just banned. For example, when someone gets banned for viciously trolling one specific forum member without the slightest provocation, whatsoever, and then a brand new ID suddenly pops up the same day or the very next day and immediately proceeds to continue trolling the same forum member just as viciously, and (sometimes) in the exact same thread in which the previous ID last posted before being banned for it, nobody really needs to be a trained detective or a rocket scientist to know what's really going on and that's it's the same antagonist using a VPN to create an endless list of new IDs for the sole purpose of continuing to do the exact same thing to the exact same person, which only detracts from the value of the entire forum to readers who come here for information, not drama and unprovoked one-sided vitriol.

Thank you. It's true that almost all of my legitimate colleagues and independent competitors have recently left the business, but I hardly consider it any kind of "victory." It was great having a community of legitimate writers contributing to threads and there used to be enough work to keep all of us quite busy. Out of my five strongest competitors, one died suddenly in his home in 2015, one became a lawyer, one retired, and one is currently preparing to start nursing school, because (like me), he wrote at least 1,000 nursing projects over the years and realized that, being 20 years yonger than I am, that's a much more viable long-term career than this will be once AI actually becomes good enough to compete with the quality of good human academic writers.