Where does the new plagiarism come from?

By which I mean: what specific sites/forums/IRC chat rooms do students use to find people willing to produce "original" works of scholarship?  When I search for such services online, all I find is an endless sea of spam.  There must be somewhere—perhaps localized at the level of individual schools—that students go to make these sorts of arrangements.  Would it not be incredibly useful for instructors to know what those sites/forums/IRC chat rooms are? (And isn't it odd that there hasn't already been some sort of collective effort to create a list of this type?)

If you know the locations of some of these sites, I would love it if you left the address in the comment or send me an email (scotterickaufman at gmail dot com).  Anonymous is fine.  I want to create a sort of master list so I can play Leverage in my spare time because I'm curious.

UPDATE 1. The answer, from my initial investigations, is that it's not craigslist.  I found a few ads there, but after a brief investigation, learned that they were all spam.

Comments

[Tom]

Do such "paper farms" really exist on a large scale? I mean, I imagine that there are some enterprising undergrads who will charge their peers to write a paper for them, but are there actually professional services that do this thing? As you mention, I just can't imagine teachers not finding out about them and then not doing...something. I imagine most plagiarism is of the "Google then copy & paste" variety. But maybe I'm naive.

[P.T. Smith]

Oh, they exist. I read a lengthy article on it a while ago, cannot remember where. But a google search turned up some articles...
http://www.ukessays.com/press.php
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article1827302.ece
http://www.dreamessays.com/customessays/Economics/1286.htm

They may be ones you already know. I'll probably get bored of attempting to move this weekend and will try to find others.

[bbass]

In my experience as a student circa a year or two ago (observing, not partaking) it was always a guy who knew a guy, or the usual paraphrasing of wikipedia and the like, never an anonymous paper farm. The quality has got to be lower for the paper farm versions than what you could plagiarize yourself if you had a mind to.

[Matt]

Wonder if anyone's ever tried to prosecute these paper farms for conspiracy to commit fraud (1L year starts in 1 month...guess I'll find out soon if what I just said makes any sense).

[Endymion]

Sneakernet, dude. Just like Metallica MP3s.

[Susan]

Coastal Carolina University already has a master list of internet paper mills:
http://www.coastal.edu/library/presentations/mills2.html
Some of them accept orders for custom papers, like this one: http://www.100percentcustomtermpapers.com/
I love the way they pledge that all the papers they sell are "100% free of plagiarism," as if this makes handing in a paper written by someone else A-OK because, you know, the person who wrote it didn't plagiarize anything, so it has to be OK, right?
Even better, check out EssayScam.org: http://www.essayscam.org/
It's a site where students who have been scammed by custom paper sites can gather and commiserate about how unethically some of the companies treat "innocent" students who only want to purchase a paper for next week's class.

[Wax Banks]

Holy monkey faces, essayscam.org is the most amazing website in existence. Thank you Susan! You've made my month.

[SEK]

Bless you, Susan. That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I've heard some other back-channel chat about private Facebook groups, about which I'll write more shortly.

(Also, essayscam.org makes me want to laugh until I cry, or cry until I laugh, watching disgruntled customers demonstrate why they help when they copy-and-paste the entire Civil Rights Act to claim theirs have been violated.)

[JPool]

The essayscam site is fascinating, if depressing. It's striking how much of the comments at the top right now are the plagarism writers complaining about clients cheating them or would be plagarists asking how best to do it and receiving advice from apparent industry insiders. They even seem to have their own trolls (or is that SEK)?

[Shane in Utah]

My favorite confrontation with a student over plagiarism involved a paper that used perhaps 100 words or more verbatim from SparkNotes. When I confronted the student, she seemed sincerely flabbergasted. I thought she was lying to me at first, but then I realized that she had got someone else to write the paper for her, and THAT person plagiarized from SparkNotes. Her look of simultaneous betrayal, anger, and mortification was priceless.

[prosehack65]

I have and acquaintance who writes papers for people via Craigslist. The problem is that he's a terrible writer, and most of his "works" are pure crap. Nevertheless, he makes good money; his best customer is a LEO studying for an MA in criminal justice.

When confronted, he insists he's doing nothing wrong, not prosecutable, no harm, no foul...