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.

As part of the government's crackdown on degree fraud, and to safeguard the international reputation of UK universities, 85 fake UK university websites have been shut down since 2015. Websites have also been found selling fake degree certificates from real universities: a BBC investigation in 2014 found a website selling the University of Kent for £500, which were described as for “novelty purposes, or as a replacement for lost diplomas”. Employers are encouraged to carefully vet the qualifications of any new employees as “The only way to stop these operators is to remove the demand”.

The Austrian minister of labour resigned from her cabinet post after allegations that her university work was fraudulent. An expert in academic fraud detection reported that her 2006 master’s thesis displayed “plagiarism, incorrect quotations and lack of knowledge of the German language”. More than a fifth of the text in the thesis she submitted last May at the Technical University of Bratislava, had been taken from other sources without quotes, including an article in Forbes magazine.

A Nottingham teacher has collected 3,800 reports on corruption in the international school system that deal with nepotism, fraud, and cheating. In England, they highlight structural "reform", with its waste of money on free schools that never open, the horrific ongoing costs of successive Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), and the way schools are pitched against each other to survive. Examples include an academy boss telling teachers to cheat on exams and the widespread relocation of students to improve school performance.

During online tests, the Ghent University received a warning that cheating had occurred and that students shared correct answers using online channels. After further examination of the evidence, the university declared all four tests invalid including those students who did not cheat. The students responsible for organizing the fraud will be sanctioned, scored zero out of 20, and excluded from any resits.

A nursery director is accused of taking advantage of a government funding programme for early childhood and pre-school education, which allowed two to four-year-olds from disadvantaged families to benefit from free nursery time between January 2017 and December 2018. She denies submitting bogus claims for funding credit and asking parents to lie about their situations.

Academic corruption exists in doctoral education even though this should reflect the highest standards of academic integrity. Doctoral degrees have become especially popular among politicians, state bureaucrats, civil servants and people seeking employment in academia. An entire market has formed in Ukraine that offers ghostwritten dissertations to order. This market consists of not only individuals but also officially registered firms. If in 2009, there were 16 such firms, by 2016 the number tripled, reaching 46.

Higher Education Statistics reports the number of Chinese students studying at UK universities has reached record levels. In the meantime, there is also an increase in the number of Chinse students who are being ripped off by fraudsters for thousands of pounds. For fear of being deported, these students pay huge sums to scammers who act as police officers.