Besides advertising on websites, the ghost-writing agency also sets up many social media accounts to
share the successful cases for promotion.
Cynthia, an overseas Chinese student from biological
science
and then double majoring in criminology at the University of California, Irvine, shared how agents
promote themselves at UCI. The agencies have their name cards recommended by students on WeChat, and
the Instagram accounts just following target people and giving examples of how they would do your
work.
Evidence we found on social media (left: WeChat Moments from Student League, showing
client using exam services; right: ghost-writing topic on Instagram)
Chatting records with Essayquality, the customer service try to sale the Zoom
baby-sitting promotion
The article writing price ranges from 600 to 800 yuan per thousand words, and the programming services
charge depends on difficulty varying from fifty to thousands. Most of the transactions finish through
online payment methods, including PayPal, Visa, Master, and WeChat.
Case Study: Student League and Simpletense
Student League and Simpletense
are well-organized enterprises in ghost-writing. Among them, Simpletense
is a company that mainly serves to write English papers with its sub-company working on science
subjects, while Student League focuses explicitly on science and finance.
Simpletense advertises on their official website that they have native language writers and North
American universities' admissions officers as a gimmick to attract students and writers. We
reflected on
the fact after asking to be one of the essay-writers and got refused for not being a native speaker.
Simpletense claims to be an
educational institution officially registered in America.
The sub-company — StudyGate even got seed funding of US$
350K in 2017. Daniel Zhao, the CEO and
founder of study gate, was previously employed at SimpleTense entitled as an executive officer.
We also cross-checked the employee names on the SimpleTense website versus those on the Linkedin
page and found
that there was not a single match. However, the staff is all based in the United States with a
foreign background, and they do
not look like fake or zombie accounts.
Screenshot of StudyGate's Linkedin page
Student League claims their writers are mainly doctors and doctors from famous universities all around
the world. However, we pretended to be writers. The recruiter started the conversation, "What university
year are you in now?" she asked. We checked the company address on the bottom of its website, which
verified to be fake, pointing to the address of Southern California university. According to
domain-info, the website was registered in Si Chuan, China operating under the Ali-cloud.
Tutor photo from SimpleTense used the model's image
Moreover, it is worth noting that they will not clearly state that they provide writing services but
define themselves as an "educational institution." Additionally, the writer's pictures displayed on
Simpletense's website is a fashion model on Unspanish. We then looked for the writers' names on
Linkedin
and found that they were not actually in this company.
Address showing on the Student League's website, 'RKWY' does not exist
Risks that consumers may suffer in buying
copywriting
works
The lack of standardization in the industry of ghost-writing can cause a lot of problems for the
consumers, among which the work quality cannot be guaranteed is the biggest one. Some ghost-writers
choose to simply offer students essays of poor quality or offer a paper to several students for
cost-saving, either of which will leave the students a fail grade. Nevertheless, some self-claimed
ghost-writers even cheat students only for the deposit, and no essays will be given after the students
get blacklisted by the con man.
Rae's sharing post on Weibo
Rae, a Chinese 21-year-old accounting student, studying in Europe, got trolled in a crucial exam by
a ghost-writing agency called essay master this September. Rae got acquainted with this agency's
staff in a WeChat group for students abroad to buy return tickets. Later, to get a higher grade in a
vital financing test, Rae decided to make her first attempt at purchasing the ghost-writing service.
The deal was finally made at the price of 1300 yuan.
However, to Rae's surprise and anger, after 3 hours' exam time, the agency just gave her an answer
for a 9-point question out of the 100-point paper. The agency apologized that they don't know their
ghost-writer cannot handle this test, but they only agreed to return half of the price." I won't buy
any ghost-writing works anymore." said Rae. After finding the fraud, Rae could do nothing but
scolding the agency to express her dissatisfaction.
Normally, the rights and interests of consumers of ghost-writing are not protected by the law. According
to the Copyright
Law of the People's Republic of China, the right of the person of the work cannot be
transferred to anybody else. Meanwhile, the deal of ghost-writing also violates the
Regulations of the
People's Republic of China on Academic Degrees. Therefore, the contracts between consumers and
ghost-writers are invalid, which means any loss under these contracts will not be saved.
The subsequent processing of ghost-writing in
universities
Although many students get used to using ghost-writing in their academic lives, the behavior of using
ghost-writing has always suffered a lot of controversies about justice.
"I don't think it's fair towards other students." Nick is a Ukrainian student majoring in business
information management at the University of California, Irvine. He held firm opposition views towards
ghost-writing. Nick explained:" Because you know, for many reasons, other students might not be able to
have access to such a resource, they might not be able to afford it. I see how this can affect my peers
and my friends."
Legally, ghost writing is strictly prohibited. According to Prevention and treatment of academic
misconduct in Colleges and Universities published in 2016, anyone who get involved in the transactions
of academic essays, including both ghostwriters and consumers, will be published. For the students,
their degrees will be canceled and they may lose their qualifications to apply for the degree.
However, universities meet with some difficulties in distinguishing the pieces written by ghost-writers.
As Mr. Wang, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, suggested that universities'
primary system to check students' works, Turnitin, can only conduct two types of checking, intragroup
checking and public database checking. Mr. Wang stated that both ways could do little in picking out
ghost-writing ones because they can only check similarities of different works." Only if the
ghost-writers produce something that they're here before, the Turnitin system can report its high
similarity."
And even if the pieces have been distinguished by the system and teachers, those found guilty of
academic misconduct can also escape from punishments with some agencies' assistance. An agency called
FindingSchool gave a case of helping students out of this dilemma. Firstly, they helped the student
write a letter of appeal to the professor. Then the agency held rehearsals of hearings for the student
many times. Finally, the student got mitigation successfully, with the suspension punishment lessened to
probation.
