Commercial contract cheating provision through micro-outsourcing web sites
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(2020) 16:4
International Journal for Educational Integrity
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Open Access
Commercial contract cheating provision through micro-outsourcing web sites Thomas Lancaster Correspondence: thomas@ thomaslancaster.co.uk Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK
Abstract As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation and providers are using more sophisticated techniques to reach potential customers. This paper discusses contract cheating industry workflows and introduces terminology to allow complexities of the industry to be more consistently discussed. Examples are provided throughout to indicate the scale and challenge of the contract cheating industry operations. An analysis of contract cheating operations on the micro-outsourcing website Fiverr.com is presented, using comparative data collected in June 2016 and October 2018. The analysis of the data demonstrates how the contract cheating industry is seeing continual change. Specifically, on Fiverr.com, this includes an increase in the number of providers offering essay writing services, particularly those from Kenya and Pakistan. The increase in service availability is accompanied by an associated reduction in essay pricing. The advertised pricing per 1000 words has dropped substantially, from $31.73 USD to $5.73 USD. The accounts used by contract cheating providers are also being replaced at an increased rate. Based on the data, contract cheating providers on Fiverr.com are currently estimated to be taking a minimum of $92,001 USD per year in revenue. This is an example calculated from only one search term on which contract cheating providers advertise on only one micro-outsourcing site used for contract cheating. The actual industry income from micro-outsourcing web sites is likely to be substantially higher. Keywords: Contract cheating, Essay mills, Academic integrity, Micro-outsourcing, Fiverr.com
Introduction The contract cheating industry, a term largely declared to mean the set of companies and individuals who are enabling students to have bespoke work created for assessment as if the students themselves had done completed it, is a complex beast. The industry employs heavy marketing pressure to convince students that they need these services, often presenting their offer as a support service, rather than one that is helping students to cheat by design. The industry is thought to be highly profitable for © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
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