Content is King, and content writers, beggars?
By Maitreyi Menon

Out here in the business jungle the customer is king, and they say in the web world, content is king. So what of the content creator? Is he/she a king maker?  You bet! But king makers are notoriously badly treated and things are no different in the case of writers! As the internet opens more opportunities to connect the business requirements between the rich countries and talent in India,  a number of scam artists are also stepping in to exploit this cross border trade.

If you have an internet broadband connection and know your ABCD thoroughly, your pay packet is made, we see innumerable ads on the job sites and bitter complaints from content firms that ‘we really can’t get the right person’ for this or that job. But how do these people get paid? It comes as a shock to see the number of ‘clients’ that disappear after the project is delivered, especially freelancers have a tough time out there. Hear these incidents!

A craigslist ad connected Shalini (name changed for privacy) in South India to a customer, identified as an individual Ms. Lee Mi Sook in the Republic of Korea; they wanted academic module writers for TOEIC.  The contract was signed on Shalini’s part and sent for endorsement to the client. (It never came back) There were two faces to the client, an American editor Craig who was rude and strict and bossy, and an apologetic brotherly Asian named Tristan. Shalini was told that she made ‘amazing’ improvement and jumped stages in the training to prepare material for them. They were in a hurry to finish that batch so begged Shalini to submit a huge number of passages fast, which of course was impossible. This was no SEO article, but level based English training mock modules.

Then Shalini asked for the money! The Asian brother wrote back saying he was sending 81.5 dollars to her bank account and this was the calculation for the part month, all neat and proper. Well, Shalini is still waiting, several reminders later. And they don’t respond to her mails either.

Raja Varma (name changed) was a technical writer working on software documentation for a renowned American company for 3 years. He connected to www.essaywriters.net after his company crashed. Raja says he wrote on several dense topics like ‘neurocysterscerosis’ for 48 days and was owed 1200 dollars, which they didn’t pay. He and others like Dawn Woods and Olga are all writers who have been duped by the company after extracting work. Later on the company came down and paid them in part, in most cases 50% of the amounts due, and then added insult to injury, citing the reason for the low payment as “client dissatisfaction, late submission, plagiarism etc”. Not one of these reasons was mentioned earlier and until a few of the writers resorted to negative publicity they didn’t come forward with the pittance too. Most people who become targets are writers who write for a living. So this is double the shock.

There are numerous content firms who even collect a deposit fee to the tune of Rs.10000/ and disappear after making the writers do a few articles. Others collect assignments from the writers and give feedback that it was not up to standard, some of these ‘rejected’ articles have surfaced in the web later on, says writers.

There are a number of web sites out there now helping people with exposing their bad experiences and lighting up the hard road for those who fall victim to these frauds by their naiveté! This forum below was formed for the exclusive purpose of providing such feedback, check it out especially if you are a king maker! http://www.essayfraud.org/forum/forums.html

Techgoss note:  Following is the email from South Korea confirming the money would be sent across to India.  It never arrived

On 8/19/07, <tristan@conprointer.com> wrote:

Dear  Shalini ,
 
Please see the below table. Your August 2007 payment is US$81.50, and we'll wire transfer this amount on August 24 because August 25 is Saturday
 
Best Regards,
 
Tristan