Scam Warning

There are a number of genuinely trustworthy essay writing sites (including us!), but there are also a lot of sites that have been set up purely to scam you.

This page warns you about some of the major dangers.

1. Watch out for fake 'British' sites

     WARNING! Anyone can buy a .co.uk domain name

     WARNING! A .co.uk domain name does not mean a site is a proper company

     WARNING! Fake sites lie about their location because they lack proper credentials

Anyone can buy a .co.uk domain name, plaster the site with Union Jack flags and claim to be British, but there's a very simple test you can apply if you want to check whether or not this claim is true: do they have a UK bank account?

If they let you pay for your work directly to a bank account with a UK bank, the odds are they're British. It's extremely hard for a foreign individual or company to get a British account, so this is one of the key tests. We have a British bank account (two, actually - with HBOS and Barclays) and are happy to accept payment this way.

Of course there's nothing wrong with a non-UK company offering an academic essay writing service, but would you really trust a site that lies about where it's based? Often, the reason they do this is to cover the fact that they have ESL writers who aren't able to write the work to the standard you require.

You can check we're really British by:

       talking to us on the phone. Get in touch with your name and number and one
          of our admin staff will call you back at a convenient time.

       making a small deposit into our bank account, just a few pence, and asking
          us to confirm the details. We couldn't do that if we didn't have a British bank
          account, and we couldn't get a British bank account if we weren't British.

       arranging to come and visit our office in west London. The address is at the
          bottom of the page, but get in touch first to arrange a convenient time.

       checking our Who.is record and you'll see our domain is registered in the UK.
          Who.is records can't be faked.

90% of other sites won't pass these tests!

2. Watch out for companies that take your money and run

You might think that it's easy to get your money back if the essay you buy is poor or non-existant, but actually it's very tricky. This is because essays sold over the internet are legally defined as 'intangible', i.e. they do not have a physical presence, so when you enter into an agreement to buy them you are tacitly accepting a certain level of risk that is not present if you buy something solid that you expect to receive in the post. It's not impossible to get your money back, but it's very hard - for example, proving that you didn't get an e-mail is almost impossible.

A lot of people think that they might be covered if they use Paypal, but again this isn't true. As this article shows, Paypal's buyer protection specifically excludes intangible items. You can check this for yourself at Paypal's Buyer Protection Policy page.

The best option, therefore, is to find a site that lets you see the work before you pay, and we're the only site that does this. Partly, this is because we're completely confident that you'll be pleased with the essay we send you, and partly it's because we think it's asking a lot to insist that you pay hundreds of pounds up front. At the end of the day, we know how many bad sites are out there, so we're willing to send you the work first as a sign of good faith.

3. Look at their prices. Are they realistic?

We're a co-operative, so we keep our prices lower than other sites and we genuinely believe no-one can offer such a good service for less.

For example:

       Order a 2,500 word essay from us and the price will be £90. We keep £4.50
          of that to cover the costs of running the site, and the writer gets £85.50

       Order a 2,500 word essay from a cheaper site and the writer will get, on
          average, around 40% of the fee, i.e. £35 out of every £90

As you can see, for the same price you're getting a writer who charges more than twice as much for his service and who wouldn't work for the terrible rates that other, inferior writers will accept.

Do you really want to trust your work to a writer who will work for less than minimum wage? All our writers are MA graduates who know their value in the marketplace and refuse to lower their prices. The only reason we offer them for such low prices is that we don't take a cut of their fees, because we're a co-operative and the website is co-owned by the writers!

4. Watch our for multiple sites owned by the same company

Some site owners have more than 50 sites. They know that no-one would ever use their poor service twice, so they try to trap unsuspecting customers over and over again.

For example, the people who own UK Essays also own Degree Essays, Oxbridge Essays and a host of others.

We only have two websites - this one, and MA Dissertations, which isn't in use yet but will soon be our dedicated Masters dissertation writing service. You can check this at Who.is by looking up either site and seeing that not only do the registrant details match, but it will also say that the registrant details are only associated with 2 sites - 24houressay.co.uk and Madissertations.co.uk.

We're 100% confident that you'll be pleased with our service and that you'll becoming one of our regular customers, so we don't need to create scores of cheap fronts. There's only one 24houressay.co.uk and that's how it's going to stay!

5. Watch out for fake online plagiarism scanners!

This is becoming a massive problem for students - companies set up free plagiarism scanners and encourage you to submit your essay.

What happens is that they scan your essay against their own database, but then they keep a copy of your essay and sell it to other students! It's legal, because they hide the details in the terms and conditions that they assume you won't read, but it's unscrupulous and wrong, and we've been in discussions with Google about banning their adverts. So far, Google have refused to do anything about this scam.

One of the most notorious is the Raptor service offered by the people who own UK Essays. Hidden in the terms and conditions is this phrase:

"we will retain any document processed by the program... and you agree that any right you may have to remuneration for use of such documents to which you hold the copyright is waived"

In other words, by submitting your essay to that company, you give them the legal right to sell your essay for profit.

Hopefully we'll have good news soon about this kind of scam being banned, but until then stick to the established plagiarism scanners that are recommended by your university, such as Turnitin.

We'll add any new scams we find out about to this page, so keep checking back!

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