This thread was highly entertaining. I give it 5 eats.

drivingmecrazy, seriously brother, lol-- you're DRIVING ME CRAZY!

Are you that stupid? To place your PhD at risk to order from a template-site with a non-working phone # that promises to deliver a dissertation in 24 hours? I can't stop laughing.

Furthermore, a PhD paper at 15 quid a page or so?! And they discount it up to 20% a 6,500 words? Really, a 26-page PhD thesis?

Oh man. Isn't intelligence supposed to be a prerequisite for graduate school? I guess not, sigh.

A PhD thesis easily takes 2000 - 5000+ hours of work. Do the math. Nobody is going to do it for 26*15 = 390 quid. Oh wait, my bad. There's a discount. 312 quid. There, that makes all the sense now.

Hi truthaboutfreelancing,

I'm not surprised you got ripped off. As soon as you load the site, you can tell it's a fraudulent, shady-ass template site with a proxied-domain. Here are a few hints that it's a scam:

1. Academia-research.com. Come on, the domain in itself should be blatantly obvious as to the fact it's a scam.

2. The site itself. It's a template site. The scam artist probably has 50-100 sites like it. Once they get enough heat (ie people e-mailing them from random e-mails and calling from randoms #'s) and getting yelled at it, they jump ship.

3. Speaking of which, the phone number is out of service. This is a dead giveaway. Furthermore, this site in particular didn't even bother with a toll-free number, and instead went with a NYC #, so even fewer people would call. Most fraudulent sites use #'s as a guise of legitimacy, and almost never answer their phones (and when they do, scam site operators have heavy accents, typically eastern European/Pakistani/Indian).

4. The domain is anonymized. While an anonymized domain is not necessarily an indicator of a fraudulent site-- there are plenty of legitimate sites in the business that for, let us say, professional reasons anonymize their domains-- more times than not scam sites are associated with anonymized domains.

5. Straight from the template site, "we pay from $5 up to $17 per page which none of other companies in the industry can afford". Heh. Let me repeat-- heh. Perhaps in Pakistan or the Philippines.

6. Not a single backlink. (google "site:academia-research.com"). Again, indicative of a throw-away site.

7. Pure 100% fraud sign, from "What we do": "Generally, our clientele request Masters or Doctoral-level writing." This is an outright lie. It's even too hilarious to address. If you believe this, well then, my friend, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you, :)

Again, if you're going to write for someone, make sure it's a legitimate site and not a template site. Second, make sure it's based in say Canada, the US, UK or a Commonwealth country, where the native language is English. Speak to the owner. You can tell if they're a native English speaker and straight forward, or a scam artist, and like I said before, 99% of the time you won't be able to reach them.

Again, I sort of feel sorry for you, but you were way, way too gullible. Next time, hedge your risks better.