While I make *no* comment as to whether they are legit or not, I would say as a person with some experience in business organization that if they registered their first domain in January 1999, the idea that the business may have existed in late 1998 is hardly a stretch. The website doesn't say that they had an essay-related website then, just that they were in business then.

But the website never says that their business in 1998 had anything to do with essays, either. That's the point I'm trying to make here. You're asking them to prove a claim they haven't made.

And you're omitting quite a lot there, aren't you? The actual sentence is this:

In business since 1998, we have provided thousands of people with the help that they need for school and for their professional lives.

Grammatically, what that says isn't even that they've actually been providing educational/professional help for people since 1998. It makes two separate claims: they have been in business since 1998 (probably true), and they have provided educational/professional help to thousands of people (depends I guess on what you define as 'help' but probably true enough). If the first website had to do with college funding, it's even likely true combined, that they were providing educational assistance in 1998.

We provide custom research, writing and editing services to students and professionals.

This is under a separate heading: "What We Do". It's also in present tense. It says nothing about what they did ten years ago.

Now, take the following sentence:

Since 1998, we have provided custom research, writing and editing services to students and professionals.

That would be a claim that would be seriously undermined by the fact that they obviously did have a web presence by early 1999, but that web presence was unrelated to essays.

What the site actually says, though, is really nothing more than that they existed at that point, which seems most likely true. They could have manufactured buggy whips at that point. The essay writing operation could have opened last week and nothing on that website would be false as long as they do really write essays now and the parent company was really open in '98... although they'd have to work pretty fast to get thousands of customers in the week since they shut down the buggy whip factory, obviously. (Or maybe not. If they just employed 1001 college students, the original sentence could even be true of the buggy whip factory.)

Well, obviously, I didn't assume that myself.

Your username is I think a good one: Writers Beware. Caveat emptor, as usual, in other words.

Being in business since 1998, even if they used to do something completely different, says a small amount about the company--that the owners haven't flaked out and run off to Belize yet and have some experience in management, etc. So, it's something. No, it's not as much as people might want. But, seriously, if you're going to write papers for a living it would seem like a really good idea to learn how to read critically.

I suppose there's a possibility that they did this maliciously, but in that case, why not just lie, or at least be a lot more cunning about the half-truth? Otherwise, maybe they have a reasonable assumption that to the reader, the difference between a company that started in 1998 doing college funding help and branched out to essays in 2000 and a company doing essays since 2000 is not significant.

They could definitely be cheats and thieves in a million other ways, but this is pretty standard marketing. Just off the top of my head, the Heinz ketchup bottle says it was established in 1869, but it definitely wasn't made with high fructose corn syrup originally... and it wasn't even part of the Heinz line until the 1870s sometime, as I recall. He started out making horseradish. But, really, that's not material to the ketchup consumer.