UK RESIDENTS: PLEASE DON'T USE ANY ONLINE COMPANY THAT DOES NOT OFFER PAYMENT BY CREDIT CARD (and if they want cash paid into a bank account run as fast as you can!!!)

Reasons to pay by credit card:

If you pay by credit card there is a seven day cooling off period for online purchases under the distance selling regulations so you can cancel your order if you've had second thoughts and still get a full refund.

If you don't get an essay or are not happy that the essay is original then contact your credit card company and tell them that what was provided is not as described on the website (ie not original). The credit card company - if they agree - will then chargeback your account.

If the chargeback is reversed - which can happen - then you need to tell the credit card company that you are making a claim for reimbursement against the card company under The Consumer Credit Act 1974 and the European E-commerce Directive 2002. The card company has to reimburse you and it's then up to the card company to pursue the offending essay company to get the money back.

I should add that you won't get any support from your card company if you just say that any essay received is just poorly written / has poor grammar / poor spelling as they will say that appreciation of the content is subjective. If you get the essay and you make a claim, you need to say that the essay clearly doesn't meet any reasonable interpretation of the subject matter, or that you were promised a customised essay and what you got was plagiarised and list the sources. I got my money back through my credit card company because I printed off the webpages that the essay company had plagiarised in creating the "custom" essay.

So, no more paying by cash, okay?!! :D
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I read Jim's essay on his post (re Devry student) and this one - both good essays and I'm sorry that you guys didn't get paid.

I wish you'd let people know who you work for as I'd be happy to order essays from you. I have been scammed in the past and find it hard to know where to order from to be assured a good standard of writing as so many bad companies seem to operate under multiple aliases.

Ben

Good essay Jim. I'm sorry you didn't get paid.

Hi Jim,

Thanks - I have received an e-mail from the site admins. (Thank you admins people!). I'll be giving your company a try in the fall semester.

Ben

I used them once. They were okay-ish. The paper was very basic - fine for a high school student but it was not a college level essay as I had requested. I wouldn't use them again but I didn't feel that I had been scammed like I have with other companies.

I really hope that you get DeVry to take some action.

I would expect that if there is proof that someone has fraudulently used a credit card from a campus computer that the college would take steps to trace the person involved. Most campus computers require users to log-in with personal ids and passwords so it shouldn't be too hard for the campus IT people to trace the user (should they be inclined to do so) - unless it was done from an open access pc and even then it might still be possible to trace the person, for example if they logged into their email account during that same session.

Credit card fraud is serious - law enforcement should be informed.

I just looked this company up as I hadn't heard from them. The web address is:

dissertation-advice.co.uk

They have a Bradford telephone number but I couldn't find a registered address on the site. I would recommend that people never deal with any company that doesn't clearly state that it is a registered company and doesn't clearly state what its street address is (ie the address at which the company is registered). That said, there are a couple of essay companies in the UK that do say they are registered and give a street address and are still scammers!

Helena, how did you pay for your order? If it was with a UK issued credit card you may be able to get a refund as there is consumer protection for purchases made over the internet that are not what you paid for. You should contact your credit card company and tell them that what was provided is not as described on the website. The credit card company - if they agree - will then chargeback your account.

If the chargeback is reversed - which can happen - then you need to tell the credit card company that you are making a claim for reimbursement against the card company under The Consumer Credit Act 1974 and the European E-commerce Directive 2002. The card company has to reimburse you and it's then up to the card company to pursue the offending essay company to get the money back.

Hope this helps!

Ben

There are very few (as in 2) good essay companies in the UK - usessays.com & oxbridgeessays.com - that's how they get away with charging so much. UK students often want UK journal sources in their references and US companies will find this harder to do.

Essay relief - very funny!!

It's cheap to be a British student if you write your own essays - max tuition fees even at Oxford and Cambridge are £3k ($4,800) a year! It's just we need a bit more competition in the essay market - a duopoly isn't healthy.

I think too many essay companies in the UK are started up by students with contacts / family in India / Pakistan - they have no interest in quality and only in making a very fast profit. I know a couple of companies who threaten to publish buyers details on their website when they complain about quality - they rely on people not wanting their college to know they buy essays. It's a bad business indeed.

I think more UK students would buy from US companies if they could work out which ones are okay. Sites like this help. But even then.... it's not a 100% guarantee as a company rep could pose as a student and say that they used their company and they were great. As ever, the message is buyer beware!

Ben

I think the problem with subcontracting to India and Pakistan isn't about academic standards in those countries - India's IIT rivals MIT! - it's the companies that are doing this - the Essay Reliefs of this world. They are not paying market rate in those countries for good researchers with strong skills in writing English. They are using cheap labour (labor to you ;-)) and non-native English speakers - not a great combination.

I like the hairdresser analogy but with the haircut you pay when your hair has been cut and you have seen what you are paying for. For me a bad experience of ordering say, for example a 1500 word essay on free market economics, was paying $300 up front and receiving a 10 page essay on a completely unrelated topic that had been plagiarised in its entirety from a free essay website. I'm assuming you wouldn't want to pay $300 for a haircut which resulted in you being scalped!

Believe me, with some companies you can generalise on their quality!!

Ben

I've mentioned two companies, earlier in this thread, in the UK that are good - but they are expensive. I've heard good things mentioned about an American company called custompapers.com but you'd have to get reassurances directly from them about the references so that they'd use sources that you could reasonably expect to have accessed from Ireland.

Hope this helps & good luck. Sounds like you've had a rough time.

Ben

I hope it works out for you Kimberley :) Let us know how you get on.

Ben

Glad it worked out for you Pitt.

I've not heard anything bad about them on here or anywhere else. I'll be ordering from them myself when I get my assignments later this month.

Hey Melinda,

You're not the only one who has been scammed!

I agree that anyone could sign up and say that one company is great and the others useless. It pays to be a little careful and read several posts - if someone is just going on about one site - either positively or negatively- then I would be dubious about what they are saying.

I have actually placed an order with custompapers.com just yesterday - not for a paper but an application I am making. I haven't had the work yet (it's due Friday) so can't tell you what the work is like from firsthand experience. I'll post again when I get it.

I have had a couple of good papers from ukessays.com (and also one very poor one from them - 38%!!), and I've also used oxbridgeessays.com who were fine. Both these companies are expensive though and I'm not totally convinced that I get good value for money (especially for the 38% paper!).

With American sites, apart from my current order with custompapers.com, I have also used paperstore.com and junglepage.com. Paperstore were appalling in my experience - the paper missed the topic completely and the customer service was poor (the 24 hr rewrite turned up a week late and wasn't worth waiting for). Junglepage.com were a slight improvement on paperstore.com but the original paper (not a rewrite) was a day late and, in my opinion, was more high school than college standard so I was disappointed overall.

I hope you find a company that helps you, and post your experiences when you do :)

Ben

I just checked out the site. Personally, I wouldn't use them as there is no indication where the company is based or who is behind the company.

The 'About us' section is very wordy and doesn't actually say anything about who / where they are and certainly at the moment doesn't give any company registration details which they should have (and should declare on their website) if they are a legitimate UK business; if they can't complete their own 'About us' section with basic company information - or don't recognise that this info needs to be provided - then I certainly wouldn't trust them with my essay!

I may be very wrong but it looks a lot like another one of the UK-Indian/UK-Pakistani essay sites that are springing up across the UK.

More and more essay companies are starting up every week in the UK, spurred on no doubt by the many newspaper articles in the UK over the summer which reported big profits for essay companys with the owner of one talking about his ferrari and lambourghini cars.

I'd give them a miss.

I think custompapers.com are okay - based on other client's testimony - I've placed an order with them that is due on Friday so I'll be able to say for sure after that.

I'd be very careful though about thinking any site that responds to your question in a well-written reply is automatically okay. I got scammed by a UK based essay company (1stclassprojects.com) and was taken in by the emails I received that promised attentive customer service and a customized essay written by an expert in my subject. The emails were tailored to my specific questions, detailed, and well written and they made the company appear very credible. The essay I got was just random paragraphs of plagiarised text, that bore little relation to the topic that I requested, and the rewrites promised didn't exist; I lost almost $500.

With any big or important purchase, it pays to do a bit of research. Check this site, and similar ones that exist - but beware of any post that seems to promote one company as the poster may well be from that company! Talk to your friends - even if you want to hide the fact it is you that needs the essay (a friend of mine needs help with a paper ... have you heard of a good company that I could tell him / her about or companies to avoid).

Finally, if you've had a bad experience then spread the word so that no-one else gets scammed.

Ben

That's great, but my point is that just because they replied doesn't make them okay. I think in this case they are okay - I'm waiting til Friday til I get my order from them to know for sure but I'm confident about them from what I've heard so far.

I wasn't criticizing you, just pointing out to other readers that it is still possible to get badly scammed by a company that has a good looking website, phone lines, and sends personalised and reassuring emails! As the customers are getting more savvy and street-wise, so the scammers are realizing that they have to do more to get your business.

Ben

I have previously posted on this thread that I have used OxbridgeEssays (amongst others) and they were fine - which they were.

I have also used ukessays.com and for two out of three papers they were fine - good 2:1 papers - the third paper was well written but I later found out that the statistics were inaccurate which invalidated the argument presented in the paper.

I have used paperstore.com and found them appalling. The paper was a poor standard, failed to address the question, doesn't use the source I had asked for at all, and their customer service was dire - the promised 24 rewrite arrived a week late and the standard was still unacceptable.

Junglepage.com were okayish. The paper was a little bit basic in coverage of the topic and it arrived a day late but it was a big improvement on the paperstore.

Custompapers.com were good - I've only used them for once so far but the standard was high; it was easily a good 2:1 standard and was an equivalent standard of the two good ukessays.com papers and the oxbridgeessays.com papers. Custompapers also delivered 12 hours before the deadline which was unexpected and much appreciated.

Given that the output of custompapers.com meets a good British 2:1, I will be using custompapers over the next academic year. They are far cheaper (£187/$300 for a 3,000 word essay versus £300/$480 at oxbridgeessays.com) and from what I've seen the quality at Custompapers is comparable.

As Anamal says, you might want to have some reassurance that an "expert" at an Oxbridge university has written your paper but that reassurance obviously comes with a hefty price tag. I'm happy with getting the same quality without the label and having money left in my pocket!!! That said, if Custompapers couldn't meet the deadline or cover the topic, then I would use ukessays.com or oxbridgeessays.com again but in my opinion custompapers wins hands down on quality and price.

Anti-American and pompous and pretentious to boot. I won't be using them them again after reading Anamal's posts.

Best avoided :-(

Not sure what bearing your dad being loaded has on anything but thanks for sharing.

You may or may not be associated with OxbridgeEssays and you may or may not be a student at UCL - who knows. Your posts certainly haven't done either Oxbridge Essays or UCL any favours.

Amy,

I do know that ukessays.com and oxbridgeessays.com aren't connected.

UKessays.com is run by a guy called Barclay and he is forever in the newspapers in the UK - the company seems okay and he does seem an okay guy even though he brags about driving lamborghini and ferrari cars on the strength of the money he is making from students. "The Times" - which is a national newspaper in the UK did a piece on him and they agreed that the essays were of a good standard although they did the usual criticism of essay companies generally.

Oxbridge Essays is run by two brothers, Philip and James, who are mentioned on the previous page in this thread. They are new graduates themselves and their company has only been around a year. There has been a couple of mentions of them in the newspapers when they were trying to recruit students to work for their company but I haven't seen any articles that look at the quality of work that customers get for their money.

Essayrelief are total fraudsters.

It is possible that 'Anamal' is trying to look less like a company man with his latest post, but it is also possible that he is just an idiot student. There's no way of really knowing on here.

As ever, buyer beware!

FBY?

Hi Abbie

I've used custompapers once and they were fine. I selected the level as "university" and the writing level as "very good" and I'm happy with what I got back (came in as a mid grade 2:1). I plan to use them again once term gets going - we only reregistered this week! - as they are a lot cheaper than their UK counterparts and the standard is pretty much the same.

If you are worried about sources for your essays you can send material to them such as articles or lecture notes that you want the paper based on. I don't know about your uni but mine offers access to electronic databases such as proquest etc so you can look up and download articles from there if you want to and then send them to custompapers. This takes the worry out of what sources they'll use and helps match sources with what your lecturers / tutors have on their reading lists.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Ben

I use Eve2 software that I downloaded online; I check all my work through this before submitting. It's reasonably effective but I'm sure it's possible that there are instances where it doesn't detect stuff.

My uni also uses turnitin.com and students have to submit all assessed coursework through that. I hate this software as it throws up material as plagiarised if you use material that you yourself have written and previously submitted. So if you write an essay in your first year and then use this as the basis of an expanded second year essay then the second year essay is marked as plagiarised. Bizarre.

I'm dubious about them. They may be okay but their administration sucks. I sent them a short (2k) essay to test them out. After a couple of days they emailed back to say they accepted it for their database and asked for my bank or paypal details - I sent paypal as I don't trust anyone online with my bank details. I've never seen my essay on the online database even though they say it is there. I'm not sending them any more of my work :-(

You don't "know" any such thing; you've simply jumped to a conclusion.

As far as I am aware the people posting on this thread that are selling their assignments are students that are selling essays that they have written and not writers working for essay companies that are reselling essays. That's certainly the case for me and I happen to also know it is the case for 'Dylan'.

There are broadly two types of essay companies in the UK (i) those that sell custom written essays, and (ii) those that resell essays that students have submitted to them and for which the student receives a cut of the sales each time the essay is resold through an online database. In a couple of cases, the essay companies has both the prewritten database and also offers the custom written service.

I'm noticed some US based essay companies offer both custom and prewritten essays so life isn't very different on the other side of the pond.

The legitimate UK essays companies advertize that they have a clause in their contracts with writers that essays will never be resold or published on the internet; they also offer this guarantee to customers on their websites. I would expect that the legitimate essay companies in the US would do the same.

I can't see any problem with students selling their own essays to essay banks when it is made clear to the buyer that the essay was written by a student, that it has previously been submitted as coursework by the author (so is most likely already in turnitin), and that any essay in the bank can be resold an infinite number of times. Anyone who wants a unique product knows to buy from companies offering a custom written service.

They might have done, but I wouldn't use the first one! (bestessays is from Ukraine)!

There is no clue on their website where they are based (as in a physical address) although they say they are a 'US based company' and there is not even a phone number or email address - the only way to contact them seems to be through the contact form on their website.

Even looking up their domain doesn't tell you anything about them.

They say they've been around for 5 years on their website but the domain looks like it was only registered in 2006.

I don't order from companies who are so vague about who and where they are.

I don't really want to post my email address on the web.

If you email the admin of this site and ask them very nicely they might forward your email to me.

I'm not surprised you were kicked off. All websites are owned and operated by someone and that person gets to decide what they want on their website.

I wouldn't be remotely surprised if a website protected companies that it was associated with in some way; it's instinct to protect those closest to you.

I think that a good proportion of posts online about essay companies are actually posted by people who own or work for essay companies: it's very easy to post a message saying 'I'm a student and this company is great' - nobody knows whether the poster is a student or in fact works for the essay company being promoted. Similarly, posts saying 'this company is terrible' may well be posted by business rivals of the company concerned.

If you visit several websites that allow people to post feedback on essay companies then you are more likely to get a clearer picture of the company you are looking into. It's always worth bearing in mind though that just because you can't see any negative posts about a company doesn't mean there has never been any on that site. Some of the sites that I visit are very entertaining to keep an eye on for the speed at which offending posts (ie any complaint or negative comment made about one or two companies) are removed while dozens of highly suspect comments remain about other companies.

If you want to be able to post anything you like about any company then set up your own website :)

I don't think it is beyond the realm of possibility that someone could create a website to covertly promote one or two companies and disparage others in the same business. As I'm not connected with the website concerned in this thread, I've no idea whether the allegation is ridiculous in this case; I've also no idea if it is true either.

It is a matter for the person posting the comment to be able to defend any allegations or comments that they post.

My suggestion that if he wants to post anything he likes he should get his own website is reasonable. Of course he would still have to be able to defend any comments that he makes but at least he would have editorial control of what appeared on his own website.

I'm also not sure about the 'verification' process at all. I don't know who is behind the site so have no idea if their 'verification' means anything.

I know that an American company that I have used occasionally (and is quite good) isn't verified by this site and when I asked the essay company about it they said they had never sought verification. I guess you can read whatever you like into that.

How do you know that Major? I'm curious.

I do for one! I'm writing my dissertation on the essay writing business and online forums. I frequently take screen shots from websites as for some reason posts do occasionally disappear.

Sorry, I took it from the tone of your post that you knew what Gantoris was doing based on previous experience rather than you were surmising.

I don't see a problem with his screen posts unless he has doctored the replies by the company as these are essentially all he is showing.

You go to these lengths to defend a website simply because you "like" them?

Must be nice to have friends like that!

You seem to have misunderstood me. I'm not backing any one up. I'm simply interested.

I do find it fascinating when people get so fired up and passionate in responding to posts when they say that they have no connection with the company or organization that is being complained about. I could understand it if the post was criticizing a movie star or a sports hero but what is it about an essay forum that makes you want to fight tooth and nail for it? I simply don't understand.

As for Gantoris' posts, he may be connected with an ESL essay company as you say, or he may not. As I've no connection to Gantoris or to the website he has complained about I'm unable to determine what his motivations are. I'm grateful that he has posted some links as it has provided me with further information for my research. I take on board your points about the credibility of the links but I am still interested to read them.

My dissertation will be written 100% by me. I have always written the assignments for my major subject myself, Major. I have used essay companies before, both in the UK and USA, but these were for my minor (what we call subsidiary) subjects which were basically course units that I had no interest in but needed to complete to graduate; it was my experience in using these companies that got me interested in this topic as a research area.

As for dubious content, I treat all posts on message boards and forums, even yours, as being dubious as I'm unable to confirm the identity of the poster. I've posted before on this website that with any post you have to be aware that the writer may be misrepresenting himself/herself to promote a particular company / sabotage a company's rivals.

Just out of interest what is your interest in essay companies / forums? You've posted previously that you are not in the essay business but you don't come across as a student. Essay companies / forums is obviously a topic that interests you as you've made 34 posts on the matter!

Is your blog something that you could post a link to here? I'd be interested to read it. I read some UK political blogs and find this one especially interesting iaindale.blogspot.com/ but it may well be less appealing to someone outside of the UK.

They have my e-mail.