At first, it was mainly writing short essays, reports, and presentations — never more than a couple thousand words. We could normally hammer out each project in three or four hours and charged around $300 a pop. After doing this for a while, one of our Libyan clients asked if we could write his entire MBA thesis, which was supposed to be something like 15,000 words. This guy was clearly wealthy — he lived in a nice apartment and just sat around playing video games on his massive wide-screen all day. I'm pretty sure he just wanted to live in the U.K., and studying was the easiest way to get a visa.

We tried highballing him on the price, figuring he wouldn't really care about the money. So we asked for $21,000 for the whole project and let him negotiate down to $15,000. But just as we were planning to take a vacation and write the thing, the guy and all his friends had to unexpectedly return to Libya. This was in March 2011 and the civil war was just starting to kick off. I figured that if these guys were rich enough to sit around in the U.K., they probably had something worth fighting for back in their homeland. But for us, it meant we lost thousands of dollars of potential work overnight.

Tony still had his other students, but without the group of Libyans, I needed cash. He suggested posting an advertisement on a tutoring website he'd used in the past. Officially, the site was supposed to hook up students with tutors, but in reality, it was crawling with illicit essay writers looking to connect with potential clients. You weren't allowed to advertise such services, but there were euphemisms everyone used. You just had to write stuff like, "provides excellent essay advice," or "can offer full support with coursework," and people knew what you meant.

It only took a few days until Sayed contacted me. His English wasn't very good. Actually, it was so bad that deciphering what he wanted was sometimes a real challenge. At first, he asked for help writing a report, but it soon became clear that by "help," he meant he wanted me to write the whole thing for him.

Sayed had moved over to the U.K. a few months earlier to pursue a postgraduate degree. He'd gotten an undergraduate degree in his home country in the Middle East and must have figured that further education in the U.K. would look good on his résumé. But he was struggling with the work and needed more than a little help.

We agreed on a price. I'd advertised a low rate on the tutoring website to try to undercut the competition — about $15 an hour, but I figured I could bill him for a few more hours than I actually spent on the work. I justified it by reminding myself how much longer it would have taken if he'd tried to do it himself. After I finished the first report, he seemed happy with the work and the price, and he quickly started asking me to do more and more of his work.