Ethical and privacy considerations of the marketing tactics used by some academic assignment providers: a case-study

In May-June 2019, Nabanita Das, a journalist writing for Nottingham Trent University and the Leicester Mercury newspaper in the UK, reported on the selfstyled ‘UK’s Best Assignment Service at Affordable Prices’ namely the academic assignment provider (‘essay mill’) help4assignment.co.uk (Das, 2019ab). Those articles highlighted help4assignment’s marketing practice of posing as young women when contacting students in attempts to secure their (i.e. students’) custom. Despite the ‘.co.uk’ website address, help4assignment is based in India. In a statement on their landing page, help4assignment (2021) states under the heading ‘We value privacy’, and note the questionable grammar and use of English, that pervade the website:

‘The best thing with help4assignment is that we are good at keeping all our customer’s basic information confidential. As our privacy policy, we never disclose any single information or data without your approval, unless it required or permitted to do so by law such as to fulfill with a call, email, SMS or similar legal process.’

However, social-media messages from help4assignment provided to the authors by student recipients and Students Union representatives at the University of Northampton during January-March 2021 indicate that, in practice, privacy is far from being at the top of help4assignment’s priorities. We outline the major concerns and will illustrate these in our presentation with appropriately redacted versions of marketing materials sent to students by help4assignment.