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Pursuing a degree is a high stakes endeavour that entails years of hard work and even taking on loans to fulfil career ambitions. Not only do scammers target students with Education Scams, but desperate students struggling with their coursework are also a prime target for Essay Writing Scams.
Due to circumstances such as language barriers, personal problems or sometimes just incompetency, students look for ways to get their assignments, essays, theses and dissertations ghostwritten. As there is a considerable demand, there are many websites and freelancers offering such services. As per our experiences at ScamAdviser, the websites operating in the academic ghostwriting industry range from being unethical to categorical scams.
We have come across a number of ‘real’ essay writing websites that are not a scam in the traditional sense as they do deliver the promised essay. However, these ‘essay mills’ are highly unethical even if technically legal as they are actively helping students cheat the education system for monetary gain.
Even the ‘legit essay writing services’ operate in a clandestine manner and try to obscure the fact that what they are doing is, in fact, highly illegal. Students risk being disqualified if they are caught using these services. It is also extremely tough to differentiate between a ‘real’ essay writing service and a fake one as there are almost no differences except for the prices.
A ‘fake’ essay writing operates the same way as a ‘real’ ones, except that they vanish or refuse to deliver the required paper once a student has made the advance payment. Students may find that the entire site has been deactivated by the time their deadline approaches. These scammers also operate through messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
They may stop responding to the student or may make demands for more money. Cases have also been reported where the scammers started extorting students using threats that they will inform their university about the student cheating unless they pay a ransom.
Some scammers are slightly more professional. They will keep up an appearance of being legitimate and even deliver a paper. Sadly, the content will be borderline nonsense that won’t help the student achieve a good grade. The student is unlikely to realize that they have been scammed till they get the results. Therefore, the student not only ends up wasting money but also risk losing their degree.
There are several sites that aggregate and review essay writing sites. They claim that they manually review sites to help students differentiate between real sites and scams. However, the fact is that there is a fair likelihood of the reviews being biased.
The reason for this is that the review sites operate on an affiliate marketing model, wherein they receive a commission for every customer referred to essay writing sites. Therefore, these sites have a monetary incentive to steer students towards the sites which give them the biggest commissions. The review site itself suffers no liability even if the service turns out to be of poor quality or a scam.
Looking for a cheap and easy way to get out of writing assignments can end up being a costly mistake. In the worst case, you even risk losing your qualifications if caught availing of these services.
