Lures and violent threats: old school cheating still rampant at Australian universities, even as AI rises

Kane Murdoch’s job takes him, his colleagues and his family to some frightening places.

“A comment … threatened to gang rape my wife and decapitate me,” he wrote on his blog in April. Members of his team and their families had also been threatened with violence as a direct result of their work, he said.

Murdoch is not a police officer or a private investigator, but the head of complaints, appeals and misconduct at an Australian university.

The threats came, he said, as a result of action that thwarted criminal gangs running schemes offering to complete assignments for students on a commercial basis – known as contract cheating.

They did it “because we shone a light on them and their business, in a systematic and implacable way”, he said.

Individuals are not the only target. In January, the University of Sydney received a bomb threat via email from an account purporting to be linked to contract cheating. The threat is understood to have resulted from an academic integrity investigation.

NSW Police were called and staff and students were asked to avoid the building until it was declared safe a few hours later. A university spokesperson said it was “extremely concerned” about the risk contract cheating companies posed.

The incidence of cheating at Australian universities has risen exponentially since the rise of generative AI, but the old-school practice of simply paying someone to do the work is far from dead, integrity analysts have said.

The illegal cheating services infiltrate personal student inboxes, claiming to offer a range of services from extension applications and failure appeals to 24-hour assignment delivery.

Rebecca Awdry, an expert in academic integrity and honorary fellow at Deakin University, said plagiarism across tertiary institutions had been a problem for years in the form of contract cheating, which typically targets international students on social media with advertised assignment services.

And there were good reasons traditional methods still found students willing to take the risk, she said.

“Unless you know how to engineer prompts [on genAI], you don’t get outputs you need or want,” she said. “Some writers [who offer contract cheating] are better or worse, but generally allow you to say what grade you’re looking for and what level of English to write to.

“With genAI, you can get something vastly out of line [with] criteria. It can be simpler to pay $200 to a contract cheating site.”

Typically, those offering paid cheating services will infiltrate online groups pitched as places to meet fellow international students or receive study advice, spamming them with dozens of posts for “affordable and plagiarism free” content with a “guarantee of confidentiality” and “timely delivery”.

“Seeking reliable academic assistance tailored to your needs?” one such post reads.

Once students join a group, they are sent QR codes for additional private Telegram or WhatsApp chats, leading to more strings of posts and dozens of private messages and calls from unknown numbers.

“Good morning, do you need any assignment help?” a typical approach begins.

One RMIT student, who wished to remain anonymous, said they had recently received three emails from separate contract cheating services in less than a week. The emails, sent in Mandarin with QR codes linking to WeChat accounts, promised “guaranteed quality”.

“I’ve had them throughout the semester, sent to my focused inbox and never labelled as spam,” the student said.

“I’ve reported them to the RMIT IT department but they never got back to me … if RMIT is serious about plagiarism, they should do something to limit this seeming use of bots to offer contract cheating.”

An RMIT spokesperson said they were unable to respond to those claims without knowing the student’s identity, but the university was “aware” contract cheating groups might target students via their personal email accounts and social media platforms.

“RMIT students undertake mandatory learning modules on academic integrity. Matters raised by students are taken seriously,” they said.

Services based overseas

Awdry said the bulk of illegal cheating services employed teams of writers and researchers, and used spam and other tactics to target vulnerable students. They have also been known to engage in blackmail.

Many of the paid content providers working for assignment companies claim to be university tutors. Awdry, speaking generally, said their integration into student communities and “word of mouth” recommendations had created a sense of normalisation – the behaviour wasn’t seen as something students shouldn’t do.

She said some of the larger companies owned numerous sites and frequently changed their names, posted flyers with QR codes around campuses and targeted groups of students on WeChat.

“International students are more likely to be detected [plagiarising] because their level of English is different – it’s more obvious, and they feel more pressure to pass,” she said.

“But domestic students are certainly using these tools.”

Under Australian law, advertising or providing commercial cheating academic services can attract penalties of up to two years in prison and fines of up to $110,000.

But the vast majority of the services are based overseas, with WhatsApp numbers frequently linked to India and Pakistan, or African countries such as Kenya and Nigeria.

Users typically switch job titles and company names, use stock images of smiling tutors as their profile pictures and claim to have studied at Ivy League universities.

By running on WhatsApp numbers without websites and a minimal digital footprint, they are largely untraceable. Company names can change overnight, and if one shuts down, there will always be more.

Since the federal government introduced laws in 2021 expanding the powers of the regulator to crack down on contract cheating, just shy of 300 illegal cheating websites have been blocked and 841 social media accounts, posts or adverts have been removed.

Many of the websites were being visited up to half a million times a month, and targeted students across multiple disciplines at institutions in every Australian state and territory.

A spokesperson for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) said blocking websites and accounts “seriously disrupts” the operations of sites and made Australia a “less attractive” place to be targeted.

But they acknowledged that Teqsa’s ability to launch a criminal or civil prosecution against services based overseas was limited.

Rise in recorded breaches

Guardian Australia asked the 38 public universities for plagiarism figures at their institutions, which they are not required to release publicly.

Just four – Deakin, Swinburne, the University of Sydney and the University of NSW – provided them.

UNSW was the first university in Australia to publicly report on student conduct complaints. Its latest figures showed there were 1,889 plagiarism and/or misconduct cases in 2022, up from 1,353 in 2018. Of those, 89% were fully or partially substantiated.

The university noted a “significant increase” in exam misconduct due to a move to online exams, citing students completing papers together on platforms such as Facebook, WeChat, Chegg and Discord.

At the same time, its Conduct and Integrity Office warned there had been a jump in direct marketing by contract cheating entities to students via their university email addresses, typically written in languages other than English.

Eleven students were excluded in 2022 for serious plagiarism, while the vast majority of those found to have cheated (729) received 0% for their assessment.

Deakin, which also publicly reports its figures, recorded 703 plagiarism breaches in 2022 (2023 was yet to be finalised), a slight decrease on 2021 (746). But contract cheating increased considerably in the same period (514 compared with 232 in 2021).

It attributed the rise to better detection methods via its use of Overcast, a detection software developed by Deakin, alongside the widely used software Turnitin.

At Swinburne, the number of sanctions for academic misconduct rose from 201 in 2018 to 329 in 2023, while warnings also jumped from 50 to 175.

Ten students were expelled or suspended over the six-year period.

There were 1,879 reports of potential plagiarism at the University of Sydney in 2023, including 940 reports of potential contract cheating and 352 reports of suspected unauthorised use of AI.

Of those, roughly 80% were partially or wholly substantiated; when AI was involved, that figure dropped to 70%.

A spokesperson said the university had experienced a rise in breaches since the pandemic, partially attributed to a spike in contract cheating.

“These services are brazen, aggressive and highly adaptable as they operate illegally and look to exploit vulnerable students, particularly targeting international students,” they said.

“We’re also overhauling our assessments to separate secure assessments where AI is not permitted from those where AI can legitimately be used with appropriate acknowledgment.”