Freelance Writer Guide Asks: Is iWriter legit or is iWriter a scam?
Update, 3/9/15: A fellow writer on one of my worksites had this to say when asked “Is the iWriter Fast Track Program a Scam?”
“$150 doesn’t quite do it either. I signed up when I first joined TB (Textbroker). I thought, okay I will give this a shot. I paid, nothing happened. After a month, I started raising hell about it being a scam. I got my money back, but only after going through 8 weeks of annoyances and yelling matches. Run away as fast as possible. FYI, the check I got in the mail for the returned money came from Egypt.”
My readers know that I will typically walk through every aspect of a writing site, detailing procedures like applying to write for pay online, the experience one can expect once approved, and even pay frequency – iWriter breaks the mold because I don’t feel they deserve that treatment. iWriter was pretty low on my totem pole for review, as the site is extremely sparse on jobs and much like the scam Write.com seemed to perpetuate, drew newbies in with the promise of high pay that wouldn’t manifest until several months of pittance-pay grunt work had been plowed through.
Essentially, the idea is that you start off as a beginner at iWriter.com, and you aren’t able to move up to the higher ranks (premium and elite, respectively) until you’ve cleared at least 30 jobs. Beginners make about half a cent per word, which is ridiculously low; so low that I’d immediately dismiss it as a possibility for my fledgling writers. I checked the site just before writing this and the only job available to beginning English writers was a 500 word piece on Indian Real Estate that paid a whopping $2.63 and came from a client with a 53% rejection rate track record. Um, no thanks.
Normally I’d just shrug this off as a bad site and move on, but iWriter lined themselves up in my sights with an appalling email. Actually, the iWriter email wasn’t so bad, it was the stomach-turning iWriter.com SCAM it led to. Here’s a screenshot of the email, with my comments in red (click to enlarge):
“This breaks down to a whopping 2.02 cpw at the highest level available on their site.”
Okay, I’ll bite. A special iWriter test that I have to take to get a higher rank, maybe? Let’s find out by logging into the iWriter.com site (click image to enlarge) –
Wow. Just…wow.
So this iWriter.com scam expects newbie writers to not only fork over $147 (!!!) to prove that they’re “serious” about writing, they also want three free pieces of SEO content to prove your “worth”. Any freelance writing site that engages in these scam practices needs to be crossed off your roster, period. No legitimate site will EVER make you PAY to work for them on ANY level – that’s not how employment or freelancing works, it’s actually the polar opposite of how it’s supposed to work.
iWriter.com is a scam, iWriter.com is a waste of time, and they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for attempting to take advantage of new writers like this. Avoid iWriter.com.
The Freelance Writer Guide 