User:WilliamBlower/sandbox

Oxbridge Essays (The Oxbridge Research Group)
Oxbridge Essays is one of the better known 'Essay Mills' which provides model essays to university students. Over the past ten years it has been featured in numerous articles   investigating the industry which generates substantial revenues. Oxbridge Essays was founded in 2006 by Philip Malamatinas after his expulsion from the University of Birmingham for undisclosed reasons. He was later joined by his elder brother Stratos Peter Malamatinas, a second class graduate in Theology & Philosophy from the University of Oxford, who left rival company UK Essays (whose advertisements were recently banned by the Advertising Standards Authority ) and his younger brother James Malamatinas who is still registered as a director of the parent company The Oxbridge Research Group despite becoming a professional cameraman in 2011, working on many major films including Guardians of the Galaxy and The Party. Although not listed as a director on Companies House, the present Managing Director is reported to be Philip Malamatinas who runs the company single-handedly following the departure of Stratos Peter Malamatinas to found The PhD Consultancy and The London Essay Company.

Stratos Peter Malamatinas gained further notoriety after creating a social media 'firestorm' after changing his name to Eros de Gray and advertising in the Guardian  for a 'Miss Moneypenny/Lara Croft' personal assistant to help him to 'research the greatest love story ever told... [and] triple as sedulous personal assistant and glamorous hostess."  Stratos Peter Malamatinas has since changed his name to Audacious Salamis & most recently Audacity Pharos via deed poll, and is currently head-quartered in the luxury Sicilian resort of Taormina where he spends his summer months.

The industry, and Oxbridge Essays in particular, has been subject to a litany of articles questioning the legitimacy and ethics of its business model. The latest journalistic enquiries by The BBC and The Guardian suggest that as many as 1 in 7 UK students may have submitted essays provided by such essay mills as their own original work in the past four years. The estimated value of the essay mill sector is unknown, although the published accounts of The Oxbridge Research Group (TORG; trading as Oxbridge Essays) suggest that revenues for this company alone may approach £1.8 million per annum. The Company however reports a substantial debt, with a large proportion of its declared six figure assets being owed to TORG by the now defunct company TutorMe whose director is listed as Philip Malamatinas.

Oxbridge Essays itself has been subject to advertising bans. In 2013 the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that Oxbridge Essays had breached advertising standards in claiming that grades for its model essays were guaranteed. Oxbridge Essays have since been banned from the Google AdWords service and its sister website Academic Minds, which is used to recruit academics exclusively for the provision of model essays for Oxbridge Essays, was prohibited by the Guardian from advertising for freelance academics in its jobs section.

Recent calls for the essay mills like Oxbridge Essays to be banned have again resurfaced, although the practical means of doing so remain unclear unless such website portals can be effectively blocked from advertising their services and only 'licensed education providers are permitted to provide academic services such as tutorials or model academic content.'  "A parliamentary petition is already under way calling for [such] essay mills to be banned" , supported by a call from the elite Russell Group of UK universities.