There’s good money in plagiarism — just ask M.T.

He’s a relative newcomer and small player in the essay-writing industry. He started up at the end of November for a bit of extra cash. He gets a 60 per cent cut for linking university students to his network of contracted writers. He’s made $5,000 in a little over two months.

(M.T. is a student at Saint Mary’s University and does not want his name used for fear of being expelled for running an essay-writing service.)

He draws his clientele mostly from the Halifax area, but he’s posted his ad on Kijiji in Calgary and Toronto and has had a few clients from those cities as well.

With just eight hours to deadline, a student can pay $100 to order a custom essay online, written by someone with a PhD.

It’s big business for the writers and it’s a big challenge for Canadian universities because most of these essays are slipping through undetected as being plagiarized.

“Need your essay done for you? Discretion assured,” reads a posting on Halifax’s Kijiji site. “Guarantee yourself a very high mark.”

Another advertises itself as “Your essay factory.”

In Halifax alone, there are at least three services advertising on Kijiji that will write original, plagiarism-free essays. But while they advertise in the open, they’re reluctant to tell their story.

“People take this . . . seriously,” says M.T., the middleman in a Halifax-based operation. “I’m just doing this for fun. Honestly, this doesn’t even take up my time. You just sit on your ass and make all that money,” he says.

Students contact M.T. through his Kijiji ad. They give him a description of their assignment and include the due date. He writes them back within 10 minutes with a price. Almost always students immediately email him back with their banking information — no haggling, no questions asked, he says.

M.T. says he has a team of PhD holders, some in the U.S. and some based at the University of Waterloo. A friend involved in the industry gave M.T. his contacts at the school. M.T. says he doesn’t know anything more about his writers beyond their location and their level of education.

The suggestion that essay writers are at Waterloo comes as a surprise to the school’s head of media relations.”It’s news to me,” says John Morris. “It’s quite possible that our graduates are writing essays. We just don’t know.” He says the university’s academic integrity code forbids buying and selling essays, but says “the question is whether they’re employees of the University of Waterloo while they’re doing this.”

M.T. couldn’t confirm if they were employees, but his writers’ level of education is a major selling point for his business, allowing him to charge around $100 for a typical first-year essay. He has charged as much as $600 for a more advanced paper.

A panicked student can place an essay order eight hours before it’s due. But there’s a premium on express service — that same first-year paper will cost up to $180.

The writer tailors the paper to the student’s academic level, says M.T. One written at the PhD level for an undergraduate would create suspicion. “These profs know exactly what they’re doing.”

Without citing a specific law, he says for legal reasons he doesn’t put a name on his essays and tells his customers that they’re to be used for reference only.

“I tell them . . . if they put their name on the work that I send them, they assume all responsibility,” he says. “Even though I know they’re not going to use it as a reference and they know they’re not going to use it as a reference.”

Not one of M.T.’s 30 customers has been caught. He says most students have received As on their assignments.

(No university student using these services was willing to be interviewed for this article.)

Bob Mann, academic integrity officer at Dalhousie University, says this form of plagiarism isn’t really on the school’s radar.

“I honestly can’t say that we get a whole lot of cases involving students who have purchased papers online,” he says. “That may be because those are harder to catch. I’m not sure.”

Last year, 14 first-year students at the University of King’s College were alleged to have plagiarized on a term paper. Initially, some of the students were rumoured to have bought their papers from DanteEssays.com.

Eventually at least seven students were found to have plagiarized their assignment, but none bought their papers online.

Peggy Heller, a past director of the foundation year program at King’s, says most of the school’s plagiarism cases involve students with copied material within their papers. Sometimes the infraction is as innocuous as inappropriately referencing ideas or quotations. Heller says she’s familiar with the essay-writing industry and agrees it’s a hard thing to detect.

“How would you know?” she says. “We’re at the point now where you can probably buy your whole education, including your doctorate.”

Many universities now use the site TurnItIn.com to detect plagiarized essays. It’s an American company that has a database of more than 135 million archived student papers and has licensing agreements with around 9,500 educational institutions.

Professors submit papers to TurnItIn, where they’re checked against the database and returned with a report that indicates how much has been copied.

Some essay mills claim their work is checked against TurnItIn, but submitted in draft form and not saved within its database.

A TurnItIn official disputes this claim. “Any of these companies claiming that they have any arrangements or access to our service are either lying or violating the terms of our user agreement,” says Chris Harrick, vice-president of marketing at TurnItIn.

But TurnItIn has a sister site, WriteCheck, which is geared toward students instead of institutions. For around $5, students can submit their paper to see if it is referenced properly. The paper will clear the TurnItIn system when submitted later on.

For a student paying hundreds of dollars for a lengthy paper, $5 isn’t much for peace of mind.

Another Halifax-based service, TheUniversityPapers.com, found under Tutors and Languages on Kijiji, says it can submit students’ papers through TurnItIn’s database for $15.

It describes itself as “professional academic assistance” that provides materials to be used “for learning and reproduction purposes only.”

But at the bottom of the homepage, it says: “In other words, TheUniversityPapers.com Team offers fully original and appropriately referenced papers.”

A man who answered the phone for a number listed on the website denied TheUniversityPapers produces essays for students.

But M.T. says such services aren’t breaking any laws.

“It’s not illegal at all,” he says. “What makes it illegal is when we do the work that the students assign for us . . . (and) if they decide to submit our work in exactly as is, that’s their problem.”

Geoff Bird is a journalism student at the University of King’s College.