Latest Africa scam - Kenyans create gmail emails and wanna be professional writers

They give client fake English sound name too. Who they fooling?

Scam? Using fake English names? may be, but this has been a 'standard practice' for a while with Ukrainian, Indian, Pakistani and even Kenyan companies having their support staff use fake English names. IMO, a scam is simply failing to deliver what you promise. You can even be a native speaker and still fail to deliver according to the requirements and that is worse than the non-native using a fake English name but doing quality work.

Never heard about Ukrainian, but this should be no standard.

That doesn't make it right or legal.


A scam is also lying about your qualifications in order to get a customer to order in the first place.

same old dead horse, too...

I did not say that but I did equivocate. If you noted my mention of standard was in quotes and it is because I do not necessarily approve but just acknowledge that the practice is quite prevalent even amongst leading writing companies. I worked for a number of Ukrainian companies such as Uvo and EW and I noted that even though the support representatives spoke on phone with heavy accents that betrayed their linguistic backgrounds, most had English names.


In my line of business, I am yet to come across a customer demanding that one of the qualifications is that of being a native speaker. The most frequent qualification I am asked is whether or not I hold appropriate qualifications (or experience) in the relevant discipline. The native speaker argument (as a basic qualification for academic writing) is important but overrated.

That's because the sites that you write for lie about it. Customers don't ask because they have already been misled that you are a native speaker.


As the service provider, that's not your call to make. You're providing the product, not paying for it.

70% of my work comes from private clients. In fact, I no longer have active accounts with EW, Uvo or any other such sites. In any case I could not have been talking about clients I get from companies because the screening is done at the company level and so I am never called upon to state my qualifications. As for the native speaker argument I say overrated because none of the private clients I have written for has ever bothered to inquire about it-not even once.

Correct. At present, determining whether or not a company exclusively hires native English speakers is both impossible to determine and irrelevant to the issue of quality. Even companies allegedly based in the U.S. have been suspected of hiring ESL speakers. I think that the reason why one nutcase was recently banned from this forum was because he inadvertently admitted that the company he was defending also did the same.

Academic Scammers Are Evolving in Trade

The Algerians are trying to get into a new academic market niche. That of selling real and supposedly registered IELTS,TOEFL,Certificates,Passports,Drivers License,ID Cards,Visas. I believe that they think the academic writing industry is either a well that is drying up, an over saturated market, or, their scam companies and dismal writers are no longer pulling in students that they can successfully scam.

If the latter is so, then the hard work of the independent writers here at EssayScam is starting to pay off and we are actually pushing them out of the industry.

They are branching out into a very dangerous line of business that could put the unsuspecting student (are they really unsuspecting in this case? They know very well what they are getting into. Eyes wide shut so to speak.) at great risk of imprisonment.

With the Algerians starting this trade, it will only be a matter of time before the South Africans, Ukrainians, Indians, Pakistanis, and other con-men from various countries get in on the act.

With any luck, these scammers will soon be caught as well and brought to justice. This time, Interpol can and should get involved.

This is an accusation that can stick and can be proven because the scammers will be breaking international laws and the students caught using these fake documents can and should bear witness against them.

Algerians, Kenyans, Nigerians - the whole continent it seems ;} They continue scamming students the regular way (ie. by luring them into ordering a plagiarized essay) while trying to engage into other, usually related niches. Having access to the scammed students' identities (real names, emails, postal addresses, social media usernames), they can forge documents and give them more 'authenticity.'

You're right that the market appears to be over-saturated; it seems everybody with a high-school or college degree who has ever written an C-grade academic essay considers themselves a 'writer' or 'researcher,' but when it comes to real quality it takes much more than that to be a successful freelance writer.

That is true. However, I have found that my writers who have potential, who started with my company writing only personal statements and application essays have a thirst to advance in their careers. When I sign them up for writer training and seminars, they begin to show improvements and, after including more language classes for them to better their use of the English language, they begin to slowly progress beyond the personal statement essays. It may take them time and they have missteps along the way but, they eventually get a grasp of how proper English papers are written. Sure I end up with only 2 out of 5 trainees advancing to this degree but it gives me happiness to see them going beyond the expectations of other people.

Since Gmail is the most common email service on the web, it is not going to be easy to stop Kenyans, Algerians, and other nationalities from generating their email accounts using the free email service. It is not like GMail investigates the background of the people that sign up for their service. They are happy enough with getting the personal and other data of the person signing up. As long as Google does not mind how their email accounts are used, there is nothing we can do to stop the fraud that emanates from the use of the gmail account.

The safe way to identify a low-risk writer is, first, absolutely avoid anybody who contacts you on social media and stick to writers who have a very long verifiable history on forums such as this one. Then, make sure that you're dealing with a real person whose name and location can be independently verified on your end.