The infernal business of contract cheating: understanding the business processes and models of academic custom writing sites

In short

Custom essay-writing sites are hard to see inside, yet the authors report reconstructing the business processes of some of them and identifying three business models.

What it looked at

An analysis of the working processes of some academic custom writing websites, reconstructed by reverse engineering what could be seen of them. The authors identify three business models among the sites examined.

Limits

The abstract does not say how many sites were examined. The sites studied are only a small part of the wider contract cheating industry.

Cited 126 times by other papers, as counted by OpenAlex in November 2026. A count measures attention, not quality.