How to avoid dishonest clients?

Having read about a problem with online payments and dishonest clients... what are the best ways for freelance writers to avoid credit card / Paypal fraud? Should I call every client to confirm the payment? Should the emails/name match the payment receipt? What if phone is fake or temporary (Skype)?

Are you new to this work? Because, in my experience, all you really need to do is use some irreversible payment method like PayPal and wait for the payment to go through before you start writing.

Unless you fail to meet a firm deadline or a customer could show PayPal or a cc company that you plagiarized or something, I don't think you really ever have to worry about having a payment reversed on you.

As long as you get paid upfront and provide the work you promised, you should be pretty safe.

The only nonpayment experience I ever had was a long-term (3+ yrs) client who had asked me to wait for payment once in a while before and had always made good. She asked to delay payment on her last two papers (without mentioning they were going to be her last two papers) and then stiffed me on them.

She even had the nerve to ask me for more work about a year later, offering to pay in advance (but without offering to pay for the last two papers from the previous year).

Since then, I never make any exceptions to the prepayment rule because if we get stiffed, there's just nothing we can do about it...and if this particular customer could do that to me after 3 years of such a polite email relationship, anybody else could do the exact same thing.

Yes (even though in the last months I've been working more like a web designer than a freelance writer ; -).


I believe there was a discussion here recently about that fact someone has reversed Paypal transaction. So I'm not sure if Paypal is actually safe for the seller or not.... I've heard that if you sell non-tangible items it is not a good idea to use Paypal.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mainly because I've never had a payment disputed but I know another writer who had a PP charge disputed (the details are in an old thread here) and PayPal ruled in his favor.

My impression is that a customer would have to be able to prove the case to them, just the same as any other PayPal dispute and the same is probably true with cc companies. If a customer shows a plagiarism report and/or the online source where a writer just copied and pasted or a marked-up file showing all the ways a paper failed to meet the order specs, I'd expect the charges to be reversed.

I also know that you can't trust a PP transaction that is post-dated waiting for funds to clear on the customer's side or "flagged" for review before it clears on your end. I had a recent scare along those lines where I let someone post-date the PP payment and then it said "payment reversed by sender" the day after I sent the paper. I contacted the customer and found out that she had no idea and that it had been reversed automatically because of some apparent delay with the verification from the banking institution. She reissued the payment immediately, it went through, and I had to apologize for assuming the worst because PP apparently doesn't distinguish between payments that are (really) reversed by the sender and by the sender's bank, referring to both situations as "payment reversed by sender."

The important question je "How to avoid dishonest writers"

I would agree 100%. The only thing worse than being a totally legitimate professional writer who has to try to distinguish himself from the rip-off artists and the company reps pretending to be "objective observers" of the industry here is being a student just looking for an honest writer who will provide good work and who will never take money for an assignment he can't complete properly.

You can ask the client to produce a non-official proof of ID to prove ownership of the card. A membership card or something that does not contain privacy law protected information should suffice. However, credit card companies always tell the users that the card with a signature is enough to validate the card. No additional ID is required. If you are worried about potential chargeback complaints, you should not worry about that as long as you provide everything you agreed to with the client.


- That happens sometimes. However, there is a investigation conducted and you will be allowed to present your evidence to prove you fulfilled your end of the bargain with PayPal. Never assume that PP will automatically side with the client. If your evidence is strong enough, you can win and prevent the chargeback from being fulfilled.

All of these electronic banking formats are what causes the problem with payments. Has no one ever given thought to simply asking the client to pay in cash via money transfer service? Yes, I know it is old school but the services do still exist. It is a bit inconvenient to pay since one would have to go to a remittance center to send the money to the writer but, it pays off in the long run. For one thing, the client gets some private information off the writer that he can use in case he wants to take up the writer on legal charges. For another thing, the writer is assured that there is no possibility of a chargeback claim due to fraud since the order was paid for in cash. In this case, the exchange of information provides a safety net on both sides that I would like to think some people would agree with.

Sure. I take Western Union cash payments, once in a while; usually, it's from hyper-cautious clients who want to remain completely anonymous, which is fine with me. In fact, I just took a WU payment yesterday that I haven't retrieved yet. I've also had a few clients actually mail me cash over the years. From the client's perspective, the only price of that anonymity is that there's absolutely no buyer protection, obviously.


Realistically, no client who very deliberately takes the precaution of paying cash is likely ever to use the writer's ID info to sue the writer. That's simply because if the client valued his or her anonymity enough to forgo buyer protection in the first place, the last thing that client ever wants is a permanent record of a court case documenting that he sued an academic writer or essay company while he was in college, for obvious reasons. Court records are searchable and the background investigations that employers do on prospective employees often include both criminal and civil cases.

When I was writing I only ever accepted payment by bank transfer. The essay was only sent once the client's money was in my bank account.

I wouldn't be so stupid as to give any client my home address.

Most of my clients were careful to remove any information from which I could identify their university.

My clients have only gratitude and appreciation for my work; so, I've never had a problem disclosing my identity or address to them.

@FreelanceWriter

But you hide full details of your qualifications, phone number and fact that you sub contract work out on website. That's what dishonest writers do too.

Negative on all three accusations and complete nonsense. I don't "hide" anything. You're afraid just to disclose your full identity and whereabouts, even to your actual clients. I provide my clients all of that info; I just prefer not to publicize it on a website for the whole world to see. I don't "subcontract" out any work other than Statistics calculations; and the only reason you even know that is that I recently mentioned, here in the thread about Statistica projects, that I use a stats specialist for SPSS and that I always fully disclose that to any clients who need those kinds of projects before I take on their projects, precisely because I'm honest about it. I also disclose my confidence level with every project to every client before taking it on, and for the exact same reason.

@FreelanceWriter

"A premier New York City law school" is not the name of the institution. I studied at Manchester University (rather than a premier red brick university in north west England). Spot the difference.

I think even you would agree that a writer based in New York city is safe from a visit by students based in London or indeed other parts of the USA.

The fact that you have to admit to some students that you are not confident of writing their essay to their desired standard is a red flag. If you stuck to topics in which you have a qualification you would not have to admit your unprofessional ineptitude.

Unfortunately for you the lies and deceptions you have wielded on this forum have been exposesd by myself and others. Students, beware egotistical hacks.

As usual, your despicable disinformation campaign targeting me relies completely on your twisting my truthful statements completely out of context. What I said was simply that I always disclose my relative degree of confidence in every project to every client before taking projects on. That's about as honest and forthcoming as a writer can be. That's also one of many reasons that I don't use an automatic online order form. Honest disclosure of a writer's degree of confidence with a project is, precisely, what honest writers do, rather than just taking on every project regardless of how well the writer believes he can write the project.

For the record, we have a perfect example of exactly how that works preserved right on this forum:

A forum member named "Lazy Skeptic" approached me with a UK Law project in March of 2011 and I responded to him, completely honestly, advising him that (at that time) I could not take on his project with high confidence. He later posted about that (Post #22) in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/es/amons-2176/#msg41552


After I declined his project, he tried a few UK-based essay companies and reported his results (Post #4) in this thread: https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/paypal-refund-money-off-topic-2145/


Then, he decided to try me for another of his UK Law projects, even though I'd expressed only "low to medium confidence" with it. As always, I erred on the safe side in disclosing my relative confidence level with his project. As it turned out, he was so thrilled with the results that he became a regular client of mine, using me for many projects for the next few years, for the rest of his academic career, which is typical of just about every client who uses me at all. Then, when he needed more (non-academic) writing, in 2020, he contacted me again, because of how happy he was with all of the projects that I provided in between 2012 and 2105. In Post #17 of this thread here, I provided the details of this particular client's history of using me for his subsequent UK Law and European Business projects in between 2012 and 2015, including a file documenting our email history, and only after very carefully redacting anything that could possibly be used to identify the client other than by his public forum user name: https://essayscam.org/forum/es/academic-writing-providers-orders-refunds-2897/#msg85797

I'd never take on any project without honestly disclosing my relative confidence with it. Contrary to your mantra that no US writer can possibly produce high-quality UK Law projects, since 2012, I've become very comfortable with UK Law projects and now do them quite routinely, and with nothing but gratitude from my UK clients. The same is true for projects in each and every one of the subject-matter areas listed on my website. Obviously, I can write very advanced projects in many of those subject areas, but only undergraduate-level projects in other areas listed there. When clients contact me with proposed projects, I always indicate what my level of confidence is with every project, and I always err on the safe side. Many times, clients decide to use me even after I disclose only a "medium" or "low" confidence level in advance. Other times, they continue their search for a provider; and, not uncommonly, they end up coming back to me because other writers (and essay companies that simply accept payment for every project automatically) provide them with unusable work that's much worse than projects in which I express only relatively low confidence.

That's precisely how this is supposed to work and it's exactly what clients hope for when they contact a writer for the first time, hoping he'll be honest with them, starting with their very first inquiry.

Lazy Skeptic Jul 12, 2012
#57866 - Essay Services / Is degree-essays good? [21]
Degree Essays

"Just got my results back for my 5000 word essay from UK company Degree essays. I have ordered from them a few times before but never really praised the company as i was paying for the service they advertsed and were just doing thier job, i.e if i had ordered a 2.1 i would get a 2.1 on my essay and would receive it on time and the staff were very helpful. But this time i was a little short of money and ordered a 2.2 instead of a 2.1. However the mark i received was a high 2.1 and am very happy. If you want a legitimate UK company order from degree essays who are part of All Answers, however i have not ordered from any other company of AA, Just DE."

Seems to me that LazySkeptic is based in the USA.

I offer no apology for repeating myself. 'A premier New York City law school" is not the name of the institution. Why are you hiding the name of the Law School and your qualification on your amateur website?

"Unprofessional ineptitude"? What's wrong with you? This is exactly what clients should hope for anytime they consider hiring a new writer. FYI, every other good writer I've ever known in this biz handles all sorts of subjects outside of their own degrees. Even within any writer's own degree areas, there are some topics that are harder to do well than many topics outside of their degree areas. Seems to me that openly disclosing anything less than high confidence is the mark of an honest writer with a very "professional" approach to dealing with clients.


FLW has always been one of the sanest and most honest/forthcoming contributors to this forum. In fact, his posts alone make it pretty obvious to anybody (including you, I suspect) that he might be the most talented writer who has ever posted on this forum. Your unmitigated hatred and obsession with trying to discredit him seems like something extremely personal and plainly rooted more in your jealousy because of that than in any intention to "protect" anybody from scams or anything else. Same goes for your repeated accusations about his "ego" and about "boasting" or "bragging," all of which makes you sound like a tweenage girl trashing the object of her jealousy.


VS.


It also seems to me like you're the one with something to hide from your own clients, not FLW. FYI, I sent several clients to FLW for projects way beyond my own capabilities and never got back anything but great feedback and thanks from those clients.

@99Essays

On Sept. 24 2014 @99Essays wrote "I'm just glad there's more fighting. It got so boring for a while that I forgot to even visit the site". If this is an example of your level of debate, spare us!

@99Essays quote 'It also seems to me like you're the one with something to hide.....'
Not disclosing one's address is a bit different from deliberately concealing your 'alleged' qualifications.
As for personal remarks and name calling, FW has called me a psychopath which shows the level he stoops to when his reputation is threatened.

@99Essays quote '....plainly rooted more in your jealousy.....'
The jealousy remark doesn't wash for reasons I've given before but as you are slow on the uptake I'll repeat them just for you. I have no affiliation to any company and I am retired. Therefore my presence on this forum is as it should be, namely to help protect students from scam, unscrupulous, dishonest essay companies and freelance writers.

One definition of a braggart/boaster who is basically insecure.
'They brag their qualities, achievements and successes to achieve the admiration and respect of those around them. And if necessary, they also resort to exaggerations and lies.'

@99Essays quote referring to FW 'with a very "professional" approach to dealing with clients'
FW offering to 'write the worst essay that I'm comfortable writing' is as pathetic a comment as I have seen anywhere. That has nothing to do with his confidence and everything to do with writing an essay capable of being passed off as the student's own.

FW has been criticised for ages on this forum yet suddenly there is a rush to defend him. Is he incapable of defending himself? Or more likely that he, even you, and everyone reading this forum knows that encouraging cheating is wrong.

Thank you. Much appreciated.

This remains the $6 million question. Read the views of people on this site particularly those with nothing to gain from giving objective advice. Self-serving opinion is easy to spot.