How to Tell If a Writing Site is Legitimate

There are quite a number of writing sites which pay you to write. While it may not always be easy to tell if a site is legitimate, here are a number of ways that you can tell whether a site is legit without actually having to join the site to find out.

Look at the Site Itself

The site should be relatively free of grammar mistakes, weird sentence structures and spelling mistakes. While this does not necessarily mean that a site is a scam, having these errors can serve as an indication that a site isn't in very good hands. Think about it. If a writing site can't even keep it's site free of these mistakes, how do you think it would be able to judge if that article a writer sent in is a decent piece of work? Chances are, they aren't. They're probably going to accept any piece of work that is half-way readable and try to sell it to unsuspecting customers. If you think that what happens on the customer side doesn't really matter so long as you get paid, think again. That attitude that they are showing to customers could just as easily reflect their attitude towards you.

A good example would be Academia-Research. Their site has a fair number of grammar mistakes and weird sentence structures. They accept badly written work and don't bother about the quality so long as they can find a customer to buy it. On the writer side, they pay writers until they get a new batch of writers, upon which they use various excuses to stop paying the old batch.

Check the Site's Whois Records

On it's own, this doesn't reveal much. However, the information gleaned from the Whois records can be used to verify the site in other ways. Some sites use a fake address. The address displayed on the site itself, the address displayed in their Whois records and them being actually located at the address given. All these three things should match. Another thing to look at is who the site is registered under. In some cases, the site is registered under someone who has been known to operate scam sites under another URL.

Check Out Writer Communities and Writer Scam Alert Forums and Sites

If a site has been around for some time, there'll certainly have been writers who have written for it before. However keep in mind that not all that is said on these communities, sites and forums is always the truth. There will always be disgruntled writers out there who hate a perfectly legitimate site for some reason and try to discredit it. On the other side of the coin, are new writers writing for a scam site who will give glowing testimonials, as a number of scam sites out there do pay new writers for the first few months to lull them into a false sense of security and convince them to continue to write for them. These writers will frequently continue to write after one or two payments have lapsed, naively believing that they will continue to get paid. It usually takes some time, sometimes up to several months, before these writers realise that they have been tricked to write for free.

While not commonly seen in the industry, another trick employed by writing scam sites is the “pay three out of ten writers”, where they only pay a small number of writers the full sum. These writers will give good testimonials because they are being paid in full, even though the bulk of writers for the site are not being paid.

Search the Web

Use terms such as “(name of site) scam”, “(name of site) fraud”, instead of “(name of site)”. This will help to filter out search results that turn up the actual site and you'll be far more likely to turn up discussions on whether the site is a scam. Search using “(name of site) scam”, see how many relevant results your search turns up, and read those scam accounts and judge for yourself whether you trust the person who's calling the site a scam. Sometimes it may just be a person trying to twist the facts. For example, I once read an account of a writer who claimed that he had been scammed by Helium. In his account of the incident, he said that he had written to several titles for a Helium contest and was leading in the contest, and a writer who had written to the same titles and the same contest after him had plagarised his work. And so to retaliate, he spammed the contest titles with one liners and reported the writer who plagarised him. Helium banned him for spamming and the writer claimed that he had been deprived of his earnings by Helium, since he was the wronged party. Hardly a case of being scammed. Just because someone has stabbed you with a knife doesn't mean that it's right for you to turn around and shoot another person with a gun. Unfortunately, not every account of being scammed is as easy to classify as this one, so at the end of the day, you'll have to rely on your judgment.

If you have checked the Whois records for the site, you can also enter the name and address in the Whois records as search terms to see if you find anything. Although these instances are rare, sometimes searches using these terms do turn up something suspicious.

While these are just some of the methods that I use to tell if a site is legitimate, I'm sure some of you will have other ways of verifying a site. Do send me a message or leave a comment here to share them with me.