EssayScam exists mainly to expose fraudsters in the essay writing world and to protect students from other related hazards.
The format that ES uses is near-perfect, IMO. Once a thread starts, forum members contribute to it with (often) relevant posts and without unreasonable restrictions. As long as forum rules are observed, no post is taken down for being deemed unworthy. That is left to the judgment of the beholder.

What I might not agree with is the notion by some forum members that threads exhaust their relevance. WRONG. A clueless student seeking academic writing assistance today needs all relevant info about XYZ.com as did a student 5 years ago. Actually, recent and updated forum contributions are even more useful to a visitor than posts from years back. What is true today might not be true tomorrow. A site that is dependable and legit today might prove unreliable after a few years.

See, if I respond to a question someone posted 10 years ago, I'm not necessarily expecting that particular person to benefit from my response. I'm rather addressing the issue raised within the post. This is a public forum utilized by entities with ongoing--pretty much unchanged--interests. There will (almost) always be a forum user in the exact position the OP was in at the time of posting.

Many veteran forum members have been reiterating that students and new users should not take the word(s) of any poster at face value. They (new users) ought to verify claims made here before arriving at their own conclusions. As such, shouldn't they be provided with all possible maps and tools with which to try find and dig for the truth? Who is to say when enough has been shared, or when sharing should no longer be allowed?

All posts relevant to a thread should be welcomed, regardless of the time of posting.
IMO, any thread that was not off-topic 10 years ago can still find relevance today, unless the subject being discussed has since (somehow) seized to exist (...and even then...)!

There are some details of the inner workings of many essay companies that remain unknown to most of the students who pay them for academic papers:

1. Papers to be completed NOT necessarily get assigned to the most suitable writer. Sometimes a paper gets completed by a writer who isn't exactly familiar with the topic, or even qualified in the discipline. In most essay companies, available orders are published on an assignments board for writers to bid on. Any writer with the clearance level (status) the assignment demands can take or bid on it. Very few companies (just 2 that I know of) deny a writer the chance to work on a paper solely because it falls outside his discipline(s) or area of specialization. Depending on how each individual system works, a Philosophy paper can be picked by a writer with an Engineering academic background.

2. Sometimes a paper doesn't get worked on until the very last day. Students think that once they place orders and confirm payment, a writer gets assigned immediately. They don't realize that a paper gets picked up by a writer (mostly) based on its appeal (difficulty, pay rate, instructions, deadline etc.) compared to the other available papers. Less desirable orders take longer to get a writer. It is not a first come, first served kind of scenario.

3. Many companies pay their writers less than 35% the rate charged to the customer. This is especially true for most ESL sites.

4. For essay companies with certain formats, the writer who gets assigned might not be the one who actually works on the paper. There has been a growing tendency of company writers to outsource work to other parties for a fraction of the pay. This happens in companies with inefficient mechanisms and where management has limited control over writers.

5. Sometimes the online operative/agent has little clue of the complex details the client is talking about. The specifics are normally just forwarded to the writer to make heads or tails of. This is true especially for sites run from Ukraine, Nigeria, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Philippines.

6. One of the main functions of company agents and operatives is to ensure that there is no direct contact between writers and customers. Otherwise, if only for efficiency, no company would have some of these middlemen in place.

The con artists in this industry are working extremely hard to blur the line between them and the legitimate entities. They are greater in number (than the legit outfits) and some of them are awash with cash. They are constantly inventing new ways to pass themselves off as the real deal and cheat students. This is why efforts to uncover their practices must constantly be updated.

New students seeking essay writing services face the constant risk of being scammed, extorted, or disappointed by the experience. The good news is that many of these students are aware of the dangers they face, and attempt to safeguard against them. The bad news is that some of these safeguards are either outdated or based on wrong premises.

I will mention a few of these and briefly state why they are invalid:

1. Grammatically flawless web copy. This used to be a valid indicator until a decade ago when the cons found out students were getting harder to fool. Nowadays, for a few hundred dollars, they can invest in hiring competent ENL writers to come up with excellent web content.

2. Pricing. Gone are the days when you could tell the legitimacy of an essay company based on how much they charged per page. Nowadays even the shadiest sites match their prices with the most prominent companies. It is their hope that some clients still relying on this indicator might stumble upon them. I have covered this topic in greater detail in a different thread.

3. A Companies House registration number. This one is for those companies claiming to be based in the UK. It takes a few hours of filling forms and like $30 to get a UK registered company from almost anywhere in the world. There are agencies fiercely competing to get clients to register companies through them. Having a UK-registered company means nothing at all in this industry, except only that that individual/group has put in a little more effort than many of the other fraudsters who are too cheap or too stupid (often both) to do the same.

4. Fluent phone or chat representative/agent. It doesn't cost that much to hire one. It is not that agent who will work on a placed order.

5. SSL Cert. This might be hard to believe, but this is what some students look out for when determining whether a site is legitimate. Obviously, a site that hasn't gone through the trouble to secure all of its transactions through HTTPS connections could be riskier. But this is strictly a transaction safety/security issue, not a service delivery competence indicator. It has nothing to do with (or show about) the person taking the money or the one who will handle the order, if at all.

For more than a decade I have worked as an academic writer for various essay companies. I have written for reputable US and UK companies as well as for a few sites operated outside of these 2 territories.

Over the years I have noticed that most of these essay companies keep recruiting new writers every year. Of course, it is good practice for any business to always stay ahead by constantly adding on to its talent pool. However, my observation speaks to more than just efforts at reinforcing human resource. Many essay companies, especially the 2nd generation ones (if I'm allowed to call them that), find it hard to deliver because they lack sufficient competent talent.

The industry, of late, has not been growing as fast as it did the previous decade. The reasons for this are several, and a different topic altogether. Nevertheless, essay companies are desperately in search of competent writers even with lower orders each season.

There are several reasons for this. Here are a few:

1. Many non-US/UK companies don't pay enough to sustain good writers, so there's little mystery there.

2. Competent labor can sometimes be hard to sustain, even for well-paying firms. A writer who is good might get a better offer and leave. I've been approached by competing companies twice.

3. Many writers realize that their input forms the gist of the final product to the customer. They figure they can cut the "middleman" and avoid profit-sharing. Of course, they initially encounter a whole new beast when they try venturing on their own.

4. In a few cases, writers leave not because of the rate of pay, but because there's little work from which to earn. This is especially true for 2 of the most established UK companies. Their legitimacy places pressure on their expense accounts. Such pressure is not experienced by ESL sites (topic for another day). As such (and for other reasons), the prices of these UK sites are way higher than the industry average. This gives them higher margins, but ultimately alienates thousands of students on tight budgets. The result is that these premium sites get fewer customers than their mid-level competitors. When orders to complete are scarce, writers get frustrated, no matter how lucrative the margins are.

5. There are companies that outright frustrate writers. The Ukrainian twins are well known for this. They offer miserable pay, impose random unfair fines, manufacture lateness, delay payments, change payment terms, introduce incredibly abusive terms mid-contract, force-assign projects, assign 'editors' who get a portion of the writers' cut etc. This item deserves a thread of its own.

6. Then there are just those writers who at some point decide they don't want to spend the rest of their productive adult lives completing academic papers for students.