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Online academic cheating services that offer to do assignments for less than AU$100 are targeting international students in Australia doing vocational courses at private colleges, including those that don’t require class attendance. According to the law introduced in September 2020, providers found to be selling or advertising contract cheating services can face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $110,000. Higher education providers are urging the federal government to extend this legislation to the Vocational Education and Training sector.

According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

According to a new report, 11% of the assignments submitted by Australian university students were written by someone else. More than 95% of students who cheat in this way are never caught. A survey distributed to 4100 students at six universities found two types of contract cheating: paying someone else to write a paper or downloading it from a collection of pre-written assignments.

According to an associate professor at the University of Calgary, the rate of academic misconduct during the pandemic rose from 38% to over 200%. Students who use the services of companies to write essays or complete assignments for them are often extorted. Companies continue to charge their credit cards, threatening to report them to their schools if they try to seek help.

The “proliferation” of essay mills over the past 5 years has led to an increase in the number of plagiarism cases. Last year, 338 cases were reported by universities in the North, with the majority of cases at Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University. 1,000 essay mills companies are currently operating across the UK. Some are allegedly involved in exploiting graduates overseas where they are forced to work 12-hour shifts producing essays for as little as $1 an hour.

A systemic study by Frontiers in Education in 2014-2018 found that 15.7% of university students commit contact cheating. In total, this potentially represents 31 million people. Meanwhile, the number of blackmail cases has increased as well. Research in the UK shows that 31% of the essay mills use misleading advertising and the majority do not guarantee content that meets the passing grade. To tackle contract cheating a joint effort is needed from legislatures, students, and professors.

The new Federal government-funded Education Integrity Unit will monitor academic misconduct at Australian Universities. Researchers report that between 6 and 10 per cent of students have cheated during their studies. The new academic Unit will address “emerging threats” to academic and research integrity, admission standards and information, student safety, foreign interference, cybersecurity, fraud, and corruption.

Between 2014 and today, 15.7% of US students admit to paying someone else to undertake their work. Schools such as Georgia Tech (GT), have launched their own weapon in the war on contract cheating, a bot. The GT bot, named Jack Watson, infiltrates cheating sites posing as a for-hire writer and homework cheater. When a GT student picks the bot to do their work, the bot sends the student a professor-crafted assignment with a secret “watermark.” Nine students who submitted the work with the scarlet letter have already been caught.