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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.

Following the rapid transition to digital delivery that many institutions have had to navigate, there has been an increase in online services that help students cheat. A simple Google search for the term ‘assignment help’ returned 279 million results in mid-June 2020 and 302 million in early 2021. In Australia to help combat the problem, the Government has passed a law that makes it an offence to provide or advertise academic cheating services in higher education and published an academic integrity toolkit.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan has ordered the shutdown of illegal campuses of private universities across the country. Preston University and Al Khair University has set up illegal campuses in Karachi and Lahore and students approached the Higher Education Commission (HEC) because these universities were not issuing degrees. The Court directed the HEC to award degrees to the students who had passed out from illegal campuses through some special arrangement and implement these policies throughout the country.

Six Iranian and Azerbaijani nationals have been arrested for stealing and selling questions and answers from the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that foreign students take for admission to universities in the United States and Turkey. The suspects allegedly charged the “buyers” between $2,000 and $3,000 for the questions provided in their network called “quarantine houses”. While searching the addresses where the suspects were arrested, Turkish police found SAT admission papers, official test question books and a host of digital evidence.

Not only have Nigerian students been cheating from each other for years, but also the plagiarised academic work hasn’t been included in any global database. In a report, Nigeria's Vice-President announced the new EagleScan anti-plagiarism software would improve the quality of research, teaching and learning in Nigeria and West Africa. He promised that the government would ensure that anti-plagiarism measures were fully implemented in the country's institutions.

TEQSA’s Higher Education Integrity Unit has updated a database of 2,333 suspected commercial academic cheating service websites, including 579 sites specifically targeting students at Australian Higher Education institutions. This intelligence sharing will enable providers to block access to these websites from their institutional networks and is part of TEQSA’s ongoing partnership with the Higher Education sector to strengthen cultures of academic integrity.