If to be honest, according to the price list of the company I though company does good job. Hence I didn’t have any doubt about quality of the service they offer because services were far more expensive than other companies. However, I after I placed order I realised how “serious” was this company.

Thus writes ‘Tim’, complaining about a terrible experience with a certain online company. The service was awful, he writes: ‘Before you place order they are very polite with you, but after you place a payment they attitude change spontaneously.’ He comments, somehow touchingly: ‘Consequently, I distressed and couldn’t refund my money fully.’

Tim is posting on a forum called ‘Essayscam.org’; a site not, as one might think, warning people against trying to cheat, lie and buy their way to a degree, but a site dedicated to helping them do it better.

Tim was trying to get an essay written for him by ‘Oxbridge Essays’. Forum members express shock and alarm that Tim should have been served up an essay that was plagiarised. ‘Hi Tim’, asks Whipster, solicitously: ‘can I ask what went wrong? How much was plagiarised, and what was the piece?’

Tim, though, seems to have disappeared from the site; we never get to learn his inner reflections on this. Perhaps he has electrocuted himself with a toaster, or perforated his ear with a toothbrush. The exchange continues, though, with spirit and vim. Chris76 voices disgust clearly shared across the forum:

These companies make the promises of doing work according to the individual requirements but they just use the writers and get the work from them, how can they assure the work meets the required standards as they dont know nothing about it themselves, if they did they wouldnt be using writers in the first place!

As well making a penetrating ethical point, Chris76 also reveals, through smooth idiomatic double-negation, that this is a forum for native English speakers – according to Chomsky, by definition perfect speakers of the language. This is no site for international students struggling to make the best of massive UK overseas fees, overcrowded classes, uptight academics and lousy curriculums. This is the linguistic elite.

Suddenly, bright light invades the forum. Scanning Google as only a graduate of an elite English institution knows how, Victoria, from Oxbridge Essays itself, detects the calumny and weighs in to save their reputation.

At Oxbridge Essays, we prides ourselves on being the only company in the market to guarantee our clients unique pieces of model research which are never stored, shared or re-used .

‘Liar’, declares WritersBeware (though there seems to be some doubt as to whether this poster is in fact a human being), apparently unconcerned about Oxbridge’s command of the English verb.

How can this exist? How mad has the world gone? A site dedicated to people whining that they have been cheated in their attempts to cheat. A site whose own moderators themselves whine that ‘the academic writing business’ is an ‘industry’ which ‘is marginalized’.

In places on the website, this combination of management-speak, embracing of contradictions, and utter bad faith is briefly modulated by a new note of pathetic exculpation. The marginalization of the essay-cheating industry is ‘quite unfortunate, as not only is it completely legal, but it also provides an incredibly important service for those clients who need example projects to guide their own work.’

Another post complains that one ‘student’ lost over a thousand pounds when a dissertation she ordered turned out to be substandard. Perhaps these scam essay sites are not so much a scam as is claimed: perhaps, in a Foucauldian switch, we can see them as performing a valuable service indeed: not, however, the service the wannabe cheats envisaged.