Students who pay essay writing services to complete their university assignments are not only breaching university plagiarism protocols but could also be charged with fraudulent conduct under NSW legislation, legal experts say.
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As a Fairfax Media investigation reveals, essay-writing services offered by the Chinese-language website MyMaster are at the centre of a widespread academic cheating scandal, potentially incriminating hundreds of students at almost every university in NSW.
David Caruso, the director of the litigation law unit at the University of Adelaide, says students who used MyMaster's services could potentially "fall foul of laws relating to dishonesty and gaining advantages and benefits via deception".
"The student is certainly doing something which I think one can characterise as misleading from the point of view of the student's relationship with the university," Mr Caruso said.
The offences of fraud and forgery, both of which carry maximum penalties of 10 years imprisonment under NSW criminal law, are among the more serious provisions triggered by the students' conduct, lawyer and fraud expert Robert Wyld said.
While such offences would be "challenging" to prove they were "not beyond the realm of possibilities", Mr Wyld said.
Although companies such as MyMaster facilitated large-scale academic cheating, authorities had few legal avenues to shut down the service, the experts said.
"With respect to competition and consumer protection as well as criminal law it's not easy to prosecute a company such as this," Mr Caruso said.
Universities would also have difficulty in bringing a fraud claim against the MyMaster company, Mr Wyld said, as there was "no direct relationship between the university and the website provider", and because the company had been "upfront in what they provide".
"They [MyMaster] will no doubt say they did nothing wrong and any student knows they must submit their own work, which means of course the answers prepared by the website provider would have to be substantially modified by the student to make the work the student's own work."
In addition to the potential legal ramifications, universities have academic dishonesty and plagiarism protocols in place which impose severe penalties against students found to have procured "ghost writing" services to complete their assignments.
SMH
