Chapati Mystery

The NYT reported yesterday in a ‘the internet might be destroying the fabric of our society’ article that students who are desperate, dishonest or rich (or any combination) can buy made-to-order term papers on the World Wide Web for as little as $9.95. A NYT editor solicited term papers on common English lit topics from three different sites. Thankfully for the future of humanity, the resulting essays were incredibly bad! The papers produced for the NYT were of such poor quality that Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, when shown an essay on the nature of Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet, guessed he would be unable to give it more than a D+. Of course, we assume that Harvard has its own in-house system for term paper manufacture, and that Harvard students in general have more sophisticated resources at their disposal. These are just harmless websites for regular kids who don’t want to do their homework. Or are they?

Intrigued by the author’s suggestion that some of the papers they had ordered might have been written by non-native speakers of English, and might well be just another form of outsourcing to the Subcontinent, I visited a couple of sites. On following a few links, I was horrified to learn that while there are many fine citizens of the USA helping young people churn out term papers, there are also many fraudulent, foreign sites, such as those listed on the very helpful watchdog site essayfraud.org. The authors at essayfraud.org reveal to us the seamy underbelly of the otherwise legitimate business of third-party term-paper manufacture. Fraudulent sites include essayrelief.com and nicetermpaper.com, which are both actually fronts for a vast Pakistani crime syndicate.

This Pakistani crime syndicate is charged with the following atrocities:

What’s more, these ‘bogus’ term paper mills pose a national security threat to the United States:

The main disadvantage to using these Pakistani crime syndicate services according to essayfraud.org is the poor ‘ESL-style’ English found in their products. A brief survey demonstrates that indeed, there is a special flavor to be found in the English on some of these sites (though I’m not sure the term ESL precisely covers it), such as in this quality guarantee from nicetermpaper.com:

On the other hand, honest, legitimate sites based in the US show the clear and unmistakeable writing style of a mediocre American college student. At www.superior-termpapers.com, the writers claim that they have “helped an infinite amount of students improve their GPA,” and warn us that they “…understand that a lot of sites in the writing industry don’t have phone numbers and are based out of developing countries, for this reason we want to distance ourselves from being this type of service.”

The more insidious and allegedly Pakistani crime syndicate site essayrelief.com is harder to sniff out, however, due to a recent Americanization of its format which makes it virtually undetectable as part of a vast foreign crime network. According to essayfraud.org,

As if this weren’t bad enough, the Pakistani sites, it seems, condone plagiarism! In the list of “Top 11 Warning Signs that a Site Hires ESL Writers from Overseas,” this intriguing item comes in a #10: ” Transfers copyright to the customer (condones plagiarism).”

It seems that this is an important quality that separates the legitimate (US-based) term paper mills from the criminal ones. The allegedly American site www.superior-termpapers.com contains the following disclaimer in tiny letters at the bottom of its home page:

On their faq page, the disclaimer is slightly different but a little clearer:

Just like escort services, term paper writing services maintain their legality in the US by claiming not to sell the products they produce. The threat to their legitimate business comes from offshore locations where copyright laws and plagiarism belong to a more hazy domain. As the allegedly Pakistani site nicetermpaper.com explains, “to us, plagiarism is a sin.” A sin, perhaps, but not a crime.