paper mill essay

Essay mills explained: What they are and why you should avoid them

Essays and term papers can be stressful, especially for international students who sometimes doubt their ability to research in depth and write thousands of words in English, all to a tight deadline.  

That’s where essay mills come in, exploiting the fears of students and offering to do the hard work for them in exchange for money. 

But here’s the spoiler alert - you should absolutely avoid essay mills. All the time.

They don’t work for you. They don’t even work for the essay writers themselves, and you should see that as a big warning sign. But more on that below.

What are essay mills? 

Essay mills are pretty straightforward: You pay a company to write your essay for you. The company in turn offloads the essay to a (usually freelance) writer. A couple days or weeks later, and you get your completed essay in return. 

It’s not like a proofreading service, where someone can check your spelling, grammar and citations for a fee (though even those are controversial in universities). No, essay mills offer to write you an entire essay from scratch. 

In other words, they allow students to commit academic fraud. In fact, they exploit the worries and stresses of students and entice them into cheating. They’re considered deeply unethical, and put students themselves at risk of severe punishment if caught. 

Another business model of this kind are essay banks. Here, students can buy essays that have already been written. But there’s a much higher risk of getting caught for plagiarism, since who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people have used that very same essay. 

Are essay mills legal or illegal?

The legality of essay mills depends on where you go to university, but the unethicality is clear no matter the location. Here’s a quick rundown of essay mills’ legal status in popular study abroad countries:  

Anti - essay mill legislation in the UK was passed in the House of Commons in February 2021, and will soon be made law. It’s not totally illegal yet, but it’s just a matter of time. 

The Republic of Ireland has also passed a number of bills to help tackle essay mills, while the practice is totally illegal in Australia and New Zealand. 

As for the USA and Canada, some US states have made them illegal, while Canada is under mounting pressure to follow suit.  

But the content and nuances of these laws changes from place to place. For example, in some US states it’s illegal for the student to use them, whereas the bills in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia are an attempt to criminalise essay mill companies themselves.

However, when we talk about legality, we’re of course talking about the law. But just because you might not cause a criminal offense by using essay mills, it’s still academic fraud and/or plagiarism. And getting caught for that can come with some dire consequences. 

Long story short, you really shouldn’t use them, regardless of their legality. 

Why you should avoid essay mills

1. if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.

The writer's pay is awful. I mean really bad. Trust me -- I write for a living, and I’ve seen hundreds of advertisements for essay mill jobs. Every time I see one I can’t believe how little money the writers make for so much time and effort.  

But does this affect you? Totally! Would you care about doing great work if, a) the money was terrible, and b) it wouldn’t take you anywhere in your career? I know I wouldn’t...

Let’s talk about cost and time to put this into some perspective. The price range of essay mills varies wildly depending on the writers they employ. You can pay anywhere between £10-£35 per page. Roll this out over a 10 page essay, and it could be anywhere between £100 and £350 for the final product. But you can also come across offers for much, much less money than this.

While that higher end of £350 might seem like a lot of money, trust me -- it’s really nothing for the amount of research, writing, citations, editing and proofreading required. 

If £100 per day is considered a “just fine but not great” sum of money in the UK, a writer would have to do all the work on your essay in 2.5 days just to make it worthwhile. And they’d have to do it without the subject knowledge that you have. 

2. The writers aren’t subject experts

Think about it: if they were a subject expert, would they really be working for a shady company that facilitates cheating? Not a chance. 

The main point is that these writers are badly underpaid and they’re not experts, therefore they’re putting very little effort or expertise into your essay. They just want to do it as quickly as possible before moving onto the next one. 

3. There’s no guarantee of a good grade

None. Since the writers are underpaid, lack expertise and rush their work, it’s a recipe for a bad final product. Multiple studies have shown that essay mills do mediocre work at best. 

The essay you pay hundreds of pounds for might get you a pass grade, but you could do much better yourself. 

4. The punishment is harsh

Every university has severe laws on plagiarism and academic fraud, which is the exact result of using an essay mill. At its most lenient, a student caught breaking rules on plagiarism will receive no grade at all for the work, but at worst they can be suspended or even expelled from your university.  

But the perfect “crime” goes unnoticed, right? Well, it’s unlikely in this case. 

5. Essay mills and detection services

Most universities use pretty innovative plagiarism detection software these days, which can pick up on any hint of fraudulent work. Thus, the risk of getting caught is very high. And by the time a student does get caught, they’ve already lost their hard earned cash to the essay mill company. 

6. Essay mills don’t care about you

The company doesn’t care about you, and nor does the writer. That’s a pretty bad starting point for doing business! Once they’ve got their money and done their sub-standard work, they can move on to exploiting someone else’s fears. 

7. There’s a risk of scams 

Most essay mill sites demand a deposit of the final amount, or sometimes the entire fee up front. Either way, you won’t see your essay until you’ve paid them something. This makes it a prime opportunity for scam artists to take your money without giving anything in return. 

You see, it’s extremely easy for scam artists to launch a website advertising essays for sale, then just shut the operation down once they’ve made some quick cash without doing any work. 

Speaking of scams, here’s an article on some other international student scams to watch out for !

8. There’s a risk of bribery too

And then there’s the risk of bribery. Even if a student thinks they’re anonymous while dealing with essay mills, they’re not. There’s an email address, bank account name, even their IP address to worry about. 

So if the company or the writer decides that they want to blackmail or bribe a student by threatening to unveil the truth, they can. And they’ll always be able to.  

A final word on essay mills: Honest work is the best work

It sounds old fashioned, but there’s no replacement for smart, hard, honest work. Any student can write a great term paper or essay assignment on their own. All it takes is time, research, and some focus. 

Even if you’re under pressure or lack some confidence in your English ability, there are so many better ways to deal with it. Use a study abroad education counsellor , speak to your teachers and your friends. They’ll be able to point you in the right direction and help make that essay easier. 

As for essay mills? Forget about them. They’re exploitative, they serve no good purpose, and you can do a better job yourself!

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Essay Mills and Why to Avoid Them

2-minute read

• 6th July 2018

Struggling with deadlines? College life feeling stressful ? You might be tempted to take a shortcut, especially if someone points you toward an essay mill. But what are essay mills exactly?

To help out, we’re here to explain what they are and why you should NEVER use them.

Essay Mills and Essay Banks

Some online businesses offer essays to students at a price. These come in two main types:

• Essay mills provide custom essays based on a specified topic, word count and deadline
• Essay banks sell pre-written essays, which are cheaper but less tailored

These businesses sometimes say that the essays they sell are just “templates” that students can use to generate ideas. However, using an essay mill is widely seen as cheating .

The Problem

Maybe you’ve read the descriptions above. But maybe you still think it sounds like an easy way to get a paper done without all the hard work of researching and writing it. Think again.

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If you use a paper from an essay mill or essay bank, you will regret it for several reasons:

• Using someone else’s words without citing them clearly is plagiarism
• If you are caught submitting a paper from an essay mill, it will count as academic fraud
• Colleges have software, such as Turnitin, designed to spot plagiarism
• Papers from essay mills can cost hundreds of dollars and there is no guarantee of quality

As a result, using an essay mill could leave you poorer and get you kicked off your course!

Essay Mills vs. Proofreading

But what if you still need help on a paper? If essay mills are a bad idea, what is your alternative? Well, the good news is that we can help! Having your work proofread has many advantages. We can:

• Correct your spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Make sure your vocabulary is academic and that terminology is consistent
• Check that all of your sources are referenced correctly
• Tighten up your writing to make sure it is clear and concise

And all of this without making any major changes that could count as plagiarism. You will, of course, have to do the research and writing yourself. But that is how you learn things in the first place! The key is that we’re here to support you.

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Fake academic papers are on the rise: why they’re a danger and how to stop them

Professor of Methodology and Integrity, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Lex Bouter is the founding chair of the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation and co-chair of the 8th WCRI in Athens, 2-5 June 2024.

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In the 1800s, British colonists in India set about trying to reduce the cobra population, which was making life and trade very difficult in Delhi. They began to pay a bounty for dead cobras. The strategy very quickly resulted in the widespread breeding of cobras for cash .

This danger of unintended consequences is sometimes referred to as the “ cobra effect ”. It can also be well summed up by Goodhardt’s Law , named after British economist Charles Goodhart. He stated that, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The cobra effect has taken root in the world of research. The “publish or perish” culture, which values publications and citations above all, has resulted in its own myriad of “cobra breeding programmes”. That includes the widespread practice of questionable research practices, like playing up the impact of research findings to make work more attractive to publishers.

It’s also led to the rise of paper mills, criminal organisations that sell academic authorship. A report on the subject describes paper mills as (the)

process by which manufactured manuscripts are submitted to a journal for a fee on behalf of researchers with the purpose of providing an easy publication for them, or to offer authorship for sale.

These fake papers have serious consequences for research and its impact on society. Not all fake papers are retracted. And even those that are often still make their way into systematic literature reviews which are, in turn, used to draw up policy guidelines, clinical guidelines, and funding agendas.

How paper mills work

Paper mills rely on the desperation of researchers — often young, often overworked, often on the peripheries of academia struggling to overcome the high obstacles to entry — to fuel their business model.

They are frighteningly successful. The website of one such company based in Latvia advertises the publication of more than 12,650 articles since its launch in 2012. In an analysis of just two journals jointly conducted by the Committee on Publications Ethics and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, more than half of the 3440 article submissions over a two-year period were found to be fake.

It is estimated that all journals, irrespective of discipline, experience a steeply rising number of fake paper submissions. Currently the rate is about 2%. That may sound small. But, given the large and growing amount of scholarly publications it means that a lot of fake papers are published. Each of these can seriously damage patients, society or nature when applied in practice.

The fight against fake papers

Many individuals and organisations are fighting back against paper mills.

The scientific community is lucky enough to have several “fake paper detectives” who volunteer their time to root out fake papers from the literature. Elizabeth Bik , for instance, is a Dutch microbiologist turned science integrity consultant. She dedicates much of her time to searching the biomedical literature for manipulated photographic images or plagiarised text. There are others doing this work , too.

Organisations such as PubPeer and Retraction Watch also play vital roles in flagging fake papers and pressuring publishers to retract them.

These and other initiatives, like the STM Integrity Hub and United2Act , in which publishers collaborate with other stakeholders, are trying to make a difference.

But this is a deeply ingrained problem. The use of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will help the detectives – but will also likely result in more fake papers which are now more easy to produce and more difficult or even impossible to detect.

Stop paying for dead cobras

They key to changing this culture is a switch in researcher assessment.

Researchers must be acknowledged and rewarded for responsible research practices: a focus on transparency and accountability, high quality teaching, good supervision, and excellent peer review. This will extend the scope of activities that yield “career points” and shift the emphasis of assessment from quantity to quality.

Fortunately, several initiatives and strategies already exist to focus on a balanced set of performance indicators that matter. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment , established in 2012, calls on the research community to recognise and reward various research outputs, beyond just publication. The Hong Kong Principles , formulated and endorsed at the 6th World Conference in Research Integrity in 2019, encourage research evaluations that incentivise responsible research practices while minimise perverse incentives that drive practices like purchasing authorship or falsifying data.

These issues, as well as others related to protecting the integrity of research and building trust in it, will also be discussed during the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens, Greece in June this year.

Practices under the umbrella of “ Open Science ” will be pivotal to making the research process more transparent and researchers more accountable. Open Science is the umbrella term for a movement consisting of initiatives to make scholarly research more transparent and equitable, ranging from open access publication to citizen science.

Open Methods, for example, involves the pre-registration of a study design’s essential features before its start. A registered report containing the introduction and methods section is submitted to a journal before data collection starts. It is subsequently accepted or rejected based on the relevance of the research, as well as the methodology’s strength.

The added benefit of a registered report is that reviewer feedback on the methodology can still change the study methods, as the data collection hasn’t started. Research can then begin without pressure to achieve positive results, removing the incentive to tweak or falsify data.

Peer review

Peer reviewers are an important line of defence against the publication of fatally flawed or fake papers. In this system, quality assurance of a paper is done on a completely voluntary and often anonymous basis by an expert in the relevant field or subject.

However, the person doing the review work receives no credit or reward. It’s crucial that this sort of “invisible” work in academia be recognised, celebrated and included among the criteria for promotion. This can contribute substantially to detecting questionable research practices (or worse) before publication.

It will incentivise good peer review, so fewer suspect articles pass through the process, and it will also open more paths to success in academia – thus breaking up the toxic publish-or-perish culture.

This article is based on a presentation given by the lead author at Stellenbosch University, South Africa on 12 February 2024. Natalie Simon, a communications consultant specialising in research who is part of the communications team for the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity and is also currently completing an MPhil in Science and Technology Studies at Stellenbosch University, co-authored this article.

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• Fake journals
• Paper mills
• Open Science movement

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The essay mills undermining academic standards around the world

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Governments across the world are fighting a global network of so-called “essay mills”, businesses that help the world’s rising population of university students to cheat their way through their studies.

A list shared among British and Australian officials, seen by the Financial Times, contains the names of 2,000 websites offering what officials and academics studying the phenomenon call “contract cheating” services.

The governments of Australia, South Africa, Ireland and 17 US states have taken some action, and England is to introduce legislation to ban these companies from operating or advertising in the country. However, contracting to write essays for students to submit for academic qualifications is currently lawful in most countries, including the UK.

The businesses’ main activity is ghostwriting assignments — often including coursework or open-book exams that contribute directly to student degree results. Students studying in a second language are a particular target. While academic software is effective at spotting plagiarism, it struggles with the essay-writing sector’s bespoke work.

To investigate the mills, the FT arranged for essays to be bought from three websites. The companies were asked to write a short essay on the history of UK education — ostensibly to help a Cambridge university student write a weekly assignment, an exercise that does not count for a final grade.

Peter Mandler, a Cambridge professor who teaches the history of UK education to undergraduates and is author of The Crisis of the Meritocracy , a core text on the topic, agreed to mark them.

The FT selected mills from a list provided by UK officials and academics that they said were of particular concern because of their scale and prominence. The first was Peachy Essay, which Gareth Crossman, a senior official at the Quality Assurance Agency, a public body responsible for academic integrity in the UK, told the FT was “one of the largest scale essay mills”. 

Its ownership and staffing is opaque. Peachy Essay says it was founded by students studying at University College London in 2007. However, it is incorporated in the US state of Wyoming, which does not require companies to list shareholders or officers. It takes payment in US dollars.

After making inquiries, the FT was called by someone using a US telephone number who would only give his name as “Kevin”. Kevin declined to answer our questions about his identity and the structure of the company.

Several details — such as describing himself to the FT as the company’s founder — suggested he was a man with several online profiles under the name “Kevin McCabe”. This person lists himself as an “experienced academic writer, dissertation and research paper consultant, university lecturer and blogger based in London”. However Kevin declined to confirm the link and asked the FT not to contact him further.

The McCabe profile on LinkedIn lists a PhD in “business, management, marketing and related support services” from Oxford university — a qualification that institution does not offer.

Two of Kevin McCabe’s profiles also feature a photograph which is, in fact, that of an Irish writer called Dominic Haugh. Haugh confirmed the photo was of him, was used without his consent and said he would take action to get it removed. He told the FT: “I’m not running an essay mill. I’m a history teacher in County Clare”.

Kevin did say he would meet FT journalists to prove he was in London, but only if we would wait until mid-November.

When commissioning the essay, the FT was promised that the author would be “Patrick”, an academic from a British university. But the FT sent Peachy Essay a link to a page with an embedded tracking script which could reveal the location of the person opening it. The link was only opened in Kenya. Peachy Essay denied that the essay was written there. But it was possible, they said, that their staff were there on holiday.

The second commission was from EduBirdie, another prominent essay mill. It made no promises about the location of its authors — saying they were from “around the world”. The company lists its main address in Bulgaria. The link we sent it was also opened in Kenya. The company declined to respond to our queries. Their only apparent response was to delete evidence of our purchase from the user account.

Kenya has emerged as a core hub of global contract cheating. The practice is not illegal there and it has a large pool of English-speaking graduates. One writer, a 23-year-old engineering undergraduate at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, told the FT that he supplied essays for students in Europe, the UK, US, China and Japan. “It’s majorly because of economic necessity. But it’s also coupled with the desire to know more, to study things,” he said.

The student said that an essay writing service pays him “roughly Ks250 [per page] (£1.64). The maximum I’ve been paid was Ks500 per page (£3.30)”. Edubirdie charged the FT £199 for the service, while Peachy charged £146 — equivalent to around £28 and £21 per page respectively.

Maurice Amutabi, a professor at the Technical University of Kenya and vice-president of the Kenya Studies and Scholars’ Association (KESSA), said the industry “fosters dishonesty, it creates a lack of scholarship”.

He said changes in higher education may enable more cheating: “Online classes tend to have almost 60 per cent in terms of submission of assignments online, and I think this has also created room for manipulation leading to these individuals for hire.”

Both essays bought by the FT were poor. The Edubirdie essay begins: “The history of the UK dates back many years ago”, while the Peachy Essay effort veers into Indian history in the last paragraph.

Mandler said “none of these is really a passing result, though [the Peachy Essay] . . . might come close, since there is evidence that the author has read (and sort of understood) at least one book that is actually on the subject”. 

The third essay commissioned by the FT was from UK Essays, a more expensive service priced at £244. Officials stated the company was a concern because of its very high profile: it is UK-incorporated and open about its work.

The essay the FT commissioned

Course: British Economic and Social History since 1880

Essay question: How And Why Has State Education Been Divided Along Class Lines?

Cost for 1,750 words:

Peachy Essay

UK Essays said it provides “model answers” for students to work off, and does not facilitate cheating. Daniel Dennehy, the company’s chief operating officer, told the FT: “We do not deem ourselves to be an essay mill. Our job is to work with the client to ensure the model answer they receive will help them learn and understand the subject matter in greater detail.”

Dennehy had previously told the FT that the company makes efforts to check whether students plan to use its essays to cheat — and blocks them if they do. However, when the FT bought an essay, a reporter was required to indicate they would abide by the company’s “fair use” policy, but faced no other scrutiny.

UK Essays said they tried to telephone the FT prior to our purchase and added that “our staff member would have spoken about the fair use policy” if we had revealed an intention to cheat.

The essay was better than the other two and received a mark of 62 — equivalent to a low upper-second class pass. (In 2020, 82 per cent of UK degrees were upper second or better.) This was within the range of grades that the FT had paid for. Mandler said that it was the best of the three but “doesn’t make much sense . . . it’s not very historical and not based on very much reading”. 

He added: “I marked these [three essays] permissively — as though they were weekly exercises to help students as they learn. If a student turned essays of this quality in for an actual assessment, they would fail.” 

Governments and higher education institutions are increasingly worried by the use of essay mills. Michelle Donelan, the minister for higher and further education in England, said: “It is completely unacceptable that companies are actively facilitating cheating and dishonest behaviour.”

UK universities have campaigned for a UK-wide ban: in 2018, 40 vice-chancellors wrote to the UK’s education secretary saying that essay cheating “is particularly hard to detect” and there is a need for “legislative backing . . . to shut down these operations”.

Thomas Lancaster, an academic at London’s Imperial College who studies the phenomenon, said the sector has “ballooned” since the mid-2000s. He estimated that “billions of pounds . . . are going through these firms every year”. In the UK, he estimates that between 5 and 10 per cent of students will use them at least once.

The UK’s National Union of Students said that essay mills “prey on students’ vulnerabilities and insecurities”. The companies often present themselves as having been set up by students or recent graduates, but regulators believe that parts of the industry are linked to organised crime.

Crossman, of the Quality Assurance Agency, said: “We are increasingly hearing of situations where students are being blackmailed after they have used an essay mill.” 

In 2018, the University of Coventry’s student union revealed that some of its members had been blackmailed for £5,000 by an essay-writing service that threatened to tell the university they had been cheating. Crossman said there is also evidence of potential “targeted identity theft” by mills.

Fighting contract cheating is very complex. In Australia it is now an offence “to provide or advertise academic cheating services relating to the delivery of higher education”. But of the 2,061 companies on the list, compiled by Teqsa, the Australian higher education regulator, only 105 have blocked themselves from Australia.

Last month, Teqsa used the newly toughened law for the first time to force internet service providers to block access to an Indian-domiciled site. Regulators, however, face an uphill task. Of the names on the list, the FT has identified 136 which have already been abandoned: mills often drop old names to escape legal action or poor reputations.

Crossman told the FT: “Targeting individual essay mills is like playing a game of whack-a-mole.”

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The criminality of essay mills is hurting universities / From David Boughey, Professor of International Business History, University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, Devon, UK

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Raising awareness of essay mills: How essay mills frame themselves as “help"

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As students, instructors, and administrators continue to increase their awareness of trends in academic misconduct, so, too, are essay mills upping the ante when it comes to extending their reach. Using predatory tactics that target stressed, struggling students, essay mills are finding a way to appeal to students in their moment of need.

It is important to understand how it is they are marketing themselves to students so that educators can mitigate their reach. It is also essential that educators support students on their learning journey and help them to feel seen, so that they are less vulnerable to these marketing strategies.

Here are some ways essay mills have framed themselves as “help” in educational settings around the world.

They advertise themselves as writing support. Under the guise of “writing help,” essay mills pretend that they are supporting struggling students. These companies are attempting to call themselves “writing assistance services” that are “trustworthy provider[s]” of material students can use to improve their own writing. Some claim to provide “thousands and thousands of free papers” which students can use “as the foundation of [their] own piece.”

A student in need may be drawn in by the supportive, empathetic tone of the article, feeling understood by these companies who are offering to help improve their writing. But this reassuring tone is, in fact, misleading: What is not mentioned is that these materials are actually ghostwritten essays that students use to represent their own work. The use of essay mills is a form of misconduct ; therefore, these services ultimately subvert authentic learning and do not, in the end, help writers seeking support.

What struggling students need in these situations are legitimate resources, supported by empathetic instructors that truly see them, identify their potential, and employ feedback loops to guide them in improving their own writing. Students and instructors alike should be wary of any essay mills parading as writing models or help in this manner.

They make themselves available where students congregate online. In addition to posting on social media–where stressed students may scroll at the eleventh hour without the presence of an educator–many essay mills are paying for advertisement spots on a variety of channels , sustaining the façade that they provide legitimate services. In fact, research suggests that contract cheating businesses employ automation tools on social media channels , like Twitter, to generate leads specific to their subject area.

This paid advertisement from an American online syndication highlights several companies that offer “expertly crafted free essay samples” to download as “models worth following or emulating.” Another online sponsored ad boasts reviewing the “TOP-3 Professional Academic Writing Services to Help You Through College” and strategically uses positive language in order to normalize the use of essay mills as a tenable writing resource, stating:

“Practical uses of this unique website include spotting new topics and content presentation ideas, creating an outline for your paper based on proper samples, and discovering new sources for your work in relevant samples. Kudos to the company for building a resource where students can find the best writing examples to learn from without violating any point in the academic integrity code.”

By advertising online in local and regional sites, these essay mills position themselves as a reputable writing resource, reaching students outside of the classroom.

They advertise themselves as an academic partner for research professionals. The cliché “Publish or perish” within academia still holds true for many around the world. When it comes to individuals seeking a promotion, increasing an institution’ s reputation, or in some extreme cases, merely keeping a position, the pressure to publish is often so great, support may be sought outside the norm.

Dr. Anna Abalkina , who focuses on academic fraud at the Free University of Berlin, has observed an increase in essay mill usage at the publishing level, saying she “believed the trade in ghostwritten journal papers was growing rapidly as scholars seeking publication by nefarious means turned away from low-quality predatory journals and towards businesses that guaranteed them publication in recognised outlets.”

Instead of merely writing a paper for a high price, these ghostwriting companies offer a “co-authorship” opportunity for those in need of a byline in a published journal. “Many scholars [are] turning to businesses such as International Publisher LLC, which offers the opportunity to become a co-author of a manuscript that is already accepted for publication by a journal.”

The papers for sale are known to utilize plagiarized materials from foreign-language PhD theses or from trade journals, then translated into English, costing upwards of €5,000 ($5,718) for a first authorship in a reputable journal. Individuals who do not grasp the true cost of contract cheating to academic integrity , may feel the pressure to seize this “opportunity” to publish. Instead of helping to facilitate innovation and share new ideas, these mills flagrantly take advantage of customers in their time of need and perpetuate a cycle of academic dishonesty. The consequences are vast and the impact of this misconduct is immeasurable: to the academic, this may result in censure by the community; to the institution, a scandal may incur; and the dissemination of such papers can endanger accurate information and overall research integrity.

They advertise themselves as “plagiarism-free.” This post reached out to a Spanish-speaking demographic, trumpeting the value of what they dubbed “‘la opción gratuita y en español de Turnitin creada por Ayuda Universitaria’ [the free Spanish Turnitin option created by University Help].”

Right away, the article makes an effort to place the business on the right side of integrity. It emphasizes “[l]a importancia de los software antiplagio [the importance of anti-plagiarism software]” and explains that it is, indeed, a crime to appropriate the intellectual property of another. It claims to offer a completely free Spanish option for ensuring originality, detailing how Ayuda Universitaria scans the internet for matches in order to detect plagiarism.

However, upon visiting the mentioned website directly, it is immediately clear that there is more available than just “plagiarism checking.” One can select what type of project is needed, the cost of that project, read reviews/ratings, and then purchase a paper for a specific degree. By utilizing key search words within the article itself (“plagiarism software” and “Turnitin”), this company not only strategically lures potential customers to their website, but also works hard to position themselves as an affordable integrity solution. And while essay mill papers are technically free of plagiarism–bespoke pieces of content written for a specific assignment or degree–students who aren’t aware that papers written by a third party are still an egregious form of misconduct may fall prey to this tactic.

Whether it’s framing themselves as “help” or simply misrepresenting their offerings in order to appeal to students and academic professionals in need, make no mistake that these essay mills are still a business. They charge a fee and sell opportunities for misconduct ; that is, when an individual involves a third party to complete an assignment, which they then represent as their own work. Especially in remote learning , it is essential for students, instructors, and administrators alike to understand the impact of these essay mills on academic integrity and differentiate between disreputable claims and legitimate resources to support writing.

Bottom line: essay mills endanger original thinking and original ideas and erode the integrity of institutions.

Essay mills are a growing market, with over 1,000 listed in the United Kingdom alone. Join members of the QAA Academic Integrity Advisory Group on the 12th of April as they discuss the risks associated with using contract cheating services.

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• 19 January 2024

Science’s fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper mills

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A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle one of the thorniest problems in scientific integrity: paper mills , businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. In a statement released on 19 January, the group outlines how it will address the problem through measures such as closely studying paper mills, including their regional and topic specialties, and improving author-verification methods.

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How cheap essays are big business

Essay mills - services helping students to cheat by writing essays and completing assignments for them - turn over millions every year. New research has shown that buying an essay is possible at incredibly low prices, although this is able to sustain a flourishing business.

Dr Thomas Lancaster 21 Sep 2020

The contract cheating industry

If you were so inclined, you could do an Internet search for essays and you’d find yourselves bombarded with essay mill companies offering that service.

When I’m giving research presentations, I often joke that if I wasn’t an academic, I could make a lot more money working in the contract cheating industry. That means helping students to cheat by writing essays and completing assignments for them. Of course, I would never do it. By doing so, I’d be throwing away a career in which I’ve spent over twenty years working to upheld academic integrity. But many people around the world feel that working in the contract cheating industry is right for them.

Deep down though, writing essays for students is not an easy way to make a living. If you were so inclined, you could do an Internet search for essays and you’d find yourselves bombarded with essay mill companies offering that service. Prices and quality vary, but you could easily find yourself paying a few hundred dollars for a bespoke essay.

But, as my research published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity shows, the majority of essay writers aren’t earning anywhere near that much.

Pricing and essay mills

I explored a popular micro-outsourcing website where individuals advertise and sell services. A wide variety of services is available through this website. Among those, there are firms and individuals offering essay writing services.

As my investigation shows, you can buy a 2000-word essay on that site and pay an average price of just $12. That’s by connecting directly to a writer and cutting out a big business essay mill. On the micro-outsourcing site, you can find writers who claim to be highly qualified, experienced at crafting essays that get high marks and with reviews from previous satisfied customers that back up those claims. I calculated t that nearly $100,000 a year of essay writing business goes through that one site alone and there are many more like it.

Still, most writers operate from countries where the economic situation means that lower wages still make sense to them.

It might look like a good deal for a student wanting to cheat, but how can working for hours to make $12 be a good deal for the writer? Well, believe it or not, writers advertise on micro-outsourcing sites like this one because for them it is a better deal than working for an essay mill. That might give you some idea what many of the larger companies pay for this type of work. Still, most writers operate from countries where the economic situation means that lower wages still make sense to them. My research found that most writers said they were based in Kenya.

Cheap essays lead to big business

Essay mills turn over millions every year. That’s how cheap essays lead to big business.

So, if I wouldn’t become an essay writer, how would I make money from the contract cheating industry? That’s simple. I would set up a company charging students a high price for essay writing, but then send the orders on to people willing to write for far less. There are hundreds of essay mills already doing just that, completely separate to all the individually operating writers.

Essay mills turn over millions every year. That’s how cheap essays lead to big business. That’s why we need to act to ensure that academic qualifications continue to hold their value.

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Essay mills: What are they, and why students should avoid them

Have you ever been stuck on what to write for your university entrance essay, or felt under pressure with the numerous deadlines looming and have no time to work on your thesis?  Maybe a friend has told you how they’ve used essay mills, or perhaps you’ve seen an ad yourself popping up on your screen while surfing the internet.

Essay mills, or “essay factories” , are businesses that offer a service to write an essay or term paper for students for a fee.

These are not your basic proofreading or editing services, but businesses where essays are written for you. They do extensive research, proofreading, citations, and deliver a final essay to the customer (i.e. you, the student), which you can credit as your own.

Essay mills are nothing new in this day and age, having started in the mid-1800s when students in fraternity houses shared term papers. Later in the 1950s, the lucrative business of ghostwriting evolved where writers wrote material on behalf of authors or celebrities. 

Specialised companies were set up near university campuses where students could walk in and purchase the services of a team of writers to do their essays for them. However, with the onset of technology and the internet, the essay mills business has mushroomed in recent years. 

Some students have opted to use essay mills to get their work done without the stress and pressure of researching and working on a paper themselves. These essay mills or essay factories are easily accessible and promoted via various social media and online platforms.

Gareth Crossman from Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA), an independent body that checks on standards and quality in UK higher education, told the BBC that one in seven college students  might be cheating  on their work. 

With essay mills, there’s a risk of bribery, while there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality. Source: Christina Quicler/AFP

International students whose English isn’t their first language may be tempted to use essay mills due to their lack of language skills or insecurities.

Despite that, they are highly unethical and can lead to students being found guilty of plagiarism and academic fraud. Nowadays, many universities and colleges use software such as Turnitin, which can easily spot any discrepancies or plagiarism in a student’s work. 

Some are even resorting to asking students to take oral examinations if it is suspected that they have not completed the work themselves. Ultimately, it’s best for students to avoid essay mills at all costs.

Students have an obligation to submit authentic work while at university, and understand how writing and researching for a paper is part and parcel of the learning journey. 

Taking the easy option of using essay mills services is for short gain only as students are essentially cheating and taking the credit for something that another person has worked on. To boot, there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality or free from plagiarism.

Suppose you are struggling with writing your term paper; why not consider taking some extra classes to improve your English language skills or talk to your university professor or counsellor for some valuable advice? 

There’s nothing quite like that feeling of pride and accomplishment of submitting work that you worked on yourself. After all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Sophocles once said, “Without labour, nothing prospers.”

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Back to school

Inside a highly lucrative, ethically questionable essay-writing service

Killer Papers is a seven-figure academic “paper mill” business. But its products are just for inspiration, its founder insists.

Kevin says he’s always been known as a good writer — a reputation that only blossomed in his Canadian high school.

“Word spread pretty quick around my 700-person school that I’m the best writer in the school,” he recalls.

The word spread to 15-year-old Kevin’s workplace, McDonald’s, where he flipped burgers. His teenage colleagues began joking with him, saying they’d pay $20 for him to write their papers. “It sounded funny at first,” Kevin says. “Then eventually, I was like: Twenty bucks? That’s more than I make in three hours .”

So he said yes.

Kevin (an alias) estimates he wrote around 50 papers for his high school classmates before moving on to college in the Northeast U.S. There, he worked at the university’s writing center and tutored fellow students in economics. After graduating, he got a job in finance and recommenced his paper-writing hustle, this time for college students.

“The stereotypical [client] is ‘ daddy’s credit card.’ But the vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job .”

In December 2016, he formalized his essay-writing services, launching an Instagram profile and website that he called Killer Papers . Kevin wrote the first hundred or so papers for free. “I did it just to get reviews and knowing that word would spread eventually,” he says. It worked.

By August 2017, he was charging $10 per page, and he’d earned enough to quit his full-time job, which he hated. “That first year, I made $50,000 from the business,” he says.

Killer Papers, based in Canada, is one of a number of so-called essay mills that write papers for clients in exchange for money. And as kids head back to school this fall, business in the industry is about to pick up. “A slow month is August, and a busy month is October,” Kevin says.

He now has around 60 writers who produce between 200 and a thousand papers a month, with prices ranging from $17.50 to $32 per page. Though Kevin is coy about sharing specific numbers, he will allow that the site’s revenue is in “the low seven figures.”

With paper mills, the quality of the end product varies wildly, depending on which service you use and what price you pay. The Killer Papers site emphasizes that its writers “are ALL American or Canadian college graduates,” in contrast to cheaper overseas competitors that employ writers for whom English is a second language.

View on Instagram

But Killer Papers isn’t a paper mill, the company insists. “Killer Papers is a tutoring service,” reads a disclaimer on the site. “KillerPapers.org custom projects are not intended to be forwarded as finalized work for academic credit as they are only strictly meant to be used for research and study purposes. Killer Papers does not endorse or condone any type of plagiarism.”

Those who use Killer Paper’s services generally fall into two camps. “The stereotypical one is ‘daddy’s credit card,’” Kevin says. But that isn’t his core customer base. “The vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job. A lot of them are older than you might expect.” They’re people, Kevin says, whose busy lives mean they don’t have the proper amount of time to dedicate to their classwork.

Killer Papers user Deke (not his real name), a 24-year-old from Texas, was more of the stereotype than the average customer. He first heard about the service from a friend during his freshman year of college, where he was studying marketing. Deke estimates that he paid more than $1,000 for around 10 papers. “I know I spent a pretty penny, and that’s probably because I’m fortunate enough to have family support me on the financial side,” he says.

Deke says he used Killer Papers to help him with his heavy course load, which he took on so he could expedite his entry into the working world. He admits he never told his family where their hard-earned cash was going. “Even if I tried to explain to them, they’re immigrants and didn’t really go to school,” he says. “They wouldn’t really comprehend it.”

Deke claims he never submitted a paper that wasn’t his own work. “When I got the papers back, I tweaked them,” Deke says. “I worked on them.” He says that the essay-writing service helped him come up with the concepts and ideas for his essays. “That’s where I really needed help. When it came to opening up a Word document to type stuff, I just kind of blanked out. I’m like, Where do I start? ”

Deke got As for every essay he submitted except for one — the result of an uber-strict professor, he says. He graduated in 2020 and started working for an NFL team; he’s now employed in the oil and gas industry. “It helped me out pretty well in terms of getting me to where I am now,” he says. He adds that his fear of the blank page has disappeared, and he’s able to proficiently write reports for his job.

Ethical questions

Passing off someone else’s work as your own — plagiarism — isn’t illegal. But it is unethical.

Thomas Lancaster, senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London, has been studying academic integrity, and essay mills’ role in destroying it, for more than 20 years. “Students see lots of temptation,” he says. “They see offers to do work for them, often disguised in the form of saying it’s ‘support’ or ‘help,’ not directly linking itself to being cheating. A lot of this is deceptive, and there’s a lot of blurring the lines between cheating and acceptability.”

Beyond the impact paper mills have on the value of academic degrees, Lancaster worries about the effect they have on students. “For students who think they’re just buying one piece of work, the problem is they then miss out on some of the core foundational knowledge we expect them to have,” he says. “When they go on to do a later assignment, they just struggle to do it.”

“We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything.”

Those involved in essay-writing services deny that they’re damaging the integrity of the educational system. Courtney, who is in her 20s and lives on the East Coast, has been working with Killer Papers since 2018. She was an English and education undergrad at college and moved into teaching kids. “I felt very confident in my ability to proofread and edit and provide pretty much any writing service,” she says. “I just really enjoy writing.”

She signed up for Killer Papers, she says, because while she felt confident in her ability to craft an essay, she was conscious others might not. “I really liked the idea that it was providing support for students who might not have the same skill set that I had,” she says. “It felt nice to be able to help people.”

In March 2022, she left her job teaching and became a full-time essay writer for Killer Papers. In part, it was the money, but she also felt like the pandemic’s disruption of education meant she couldn’t make as much of an impact on kids’ learning as she wanted to. She tries to write between 15 and 30 assignments a week, depending on length. That allows her to match her $45,000 teacher’s salary, she says.

When she’s asked how she feels about the morality of what she does, Courtney demurs. “We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything,” she says. “And we’re not encouraging them to submit any work.” Kevin, Killer Papers’ founder, makes similar points. “They’re assigned limited usage rights,” he says. “Basically, it’s for inspiration or study purposes. You’re not allowed to reuse it or anything like that.”

Kevin says that you wouldn’t hold a gun manufacturer liable for what someone does with a firearm so you shouldn’t hold Killer Papers liable for any students who decide to submit work the service produces as their own. “Everybody has free will,” he says.

When Input points out that many people do think gun manufacturers should be held liable, Kevin counters that you wouldn’t hold alcohol producers responsible for the actions of someone who’s drunk. When Input points out that cigarettes are similar — and that the tobacco industry has been held liable for its impact — and asks whether he really doesn’t believe kids aren’t passing off his essays as their own, Kevin asks to go off the record.

Courtney holds the line firm. “It’s fabulous to support students any way that they need, but in the same way that I couldn’t control my students in the classroom not submitting homework, I also can’t control what a student does with content that’s been submitted to them,” she says. “They’ve signed an agreement that they’ve read on the site, and they see we’re not condoning it in the slightest.”

“ People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money. That’s just not accurate .”

That she’s part of an industry fueling cheating is the biggest misconception people have about her work, she says. “People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money,” she says. “That’s just not accurate. I genuinely care about supporting students, and I want them to feel confident in the process.

“I encourage feedback,” she continues. “I encourage questions and critiques and everything, because not only does that help me to improve, but it makes them feel more comfortable that I’m not just some robot or some random individual with no other purpose than a paycheck.” Such communication happens via a chat function on the website.

Kevin’s vision for the future of Killer Papers is a confusing one. “I don’t see a world where three years from now we’re still selling custom essays, to be honest with you,” he says. Instead, he foresees the essay-writing service disappearing, to be replaced by bona fide tutoring services. Meaning Killer Papers may someday rebrand. “We need a name that transcends essay writing, to be something that can compete with [high-profile online tutoring service] Varsity Tutors,” he says.

Perhaps it’s a tacit admission that he wants to go totally legit. In a pre-interview email to Input , Kevin struck a more reflective tone regarding what he does for a living. “The reason I thought I picked this business initially is because I was good at writing, I liked writing, and people were willing to pay me to do it,” he shares.

“But the truth is, I picked it because I was desperate and knew I had what it took to make it work, at least enough to get me out of the corporate job and two-hour commute I hated,” Kevin continues. “If I hadn’t been so desperate, maybe I’d be changing the world right now.”