Refund Policy

What this covers

VEA has one paid product: the Certified English Placement Exam, $6, bought once per attempt. Everything else on the site is free, so there is nothing else to refund.

The sale is processed by a third-party payment provider, acting as merchant of record — it is the company on your bank statement and the one that issues your invoice. Refunds go back through that same route, to the card or account you paid with. We do not hold your payment details and cannot pay you by any other method.

Before you start the exam — 14 days, no questions

Beginning the exam means clicking Start and being shown the first question. Loading the intro page, reading the rules or signing in does not count.

Once you have started

From the moment you see the first question, you are using the thing you bought — the questions, the recordings, the marking. From then on a refund depends on what went wrong.

We refund

• A technical fault on our side: the exam would not load, a section would not submit, a recording was lost, the marker never returned a result, the certificate never arrived.
• A duplicate charge, or a charge you did not authorise.
• A mark we cannot stand behind after a human has looked at it — if we find your band was wrong and cannot correct it, you get your money back.

We do not refund

• A result you did not like. You bought an assessment, not a grade. Being placed at A2 when you hoped for B1 means the exam worked.
• Running out of time, or leaving the exam unfinished by choice.
• A certificate withheld because the attempt failed our integrity checks. If you think that call was wrong, ask us to review it — that route is free.
• The exam not being accepted by a university, employer or immigration authority. We state clearly, before you buy and on the certificate itself, that it is not an accredited qualification.

Outside those lists, ask anyway. This is a small academy, not a call centre, and there is a person reading.

If you are in the EU or the UK

Consumer law gives you 14 days to withdraw from most online purchases. For digital content that right ends once delivery has begun with your express consent — and at checkout you are asked to give exactly that consent, because the exam is delivered the moment you start it.

In practice this changes nothing about the policy above: before you start, you can withdraw and be refunded in full; after you start, the statutory right no longer applies but our own rules in the previous section still do, and they are wider than the law requires.

Nothing on this page limits any right you have under the consumer law of your own country.

How to ask

• Email virtuousenglishacademy@outlook.com from the address on your VEA account.
• Put "Refund" in the subject line.
• Include the order reference from your receipt if you still have it — and if you do not, your account email is enough for us to find it.
• Tell us in one line what happened. You do not need to make a case.

We answer within two working days and, once agreed, the refund is issued the same day. How long it then takes to appear is your bank's business, not ours — usually a few days, occasionally up to ten.

Please ask us before you contact your bank

If a charge looks wrong, the fastest fix is an email to us. Asking your bank to reverse it — a chargeback — takes weeks rather than days, freezes the question while it is investigated, and costs us a fixed penalty on top of the refund we would have given you anyway.

One thing that genuinely confuses people, so it is worth saying: the charge on your statement will show our payment provider's name, not "Virtuous English Academy". That is normal for a merchant of record. If you see a charge you do not recognise around the time you bought the exam, that is probably what it is — write to us and we will confirm it in minutes.

We have never refused a refund to someone who asked politely and we do not intend to start.