As someone who worked as a grad student in a large Midwestern university, these "paper writing" services have been around since the dawn of time. As a grad stu

As someone who worked as a grad student in a large Midwestern university, these "paper writing" services have been around since the dawn of time. As a grad student, it was hilariously easy to spot these for several reasons. One, the writing style is usually inconsistent. You'll have a student writing at about a high school level suddenly start using huge $5 words? Highly unlikely. Or a student who writes almost exclusively on one topic (our school had a ton of ag engineers so anything farm related was a favorite) and then suddenly is interested in the micro-economics of island based economies? Yeah, that's a big rad flag too. As a University, our golden rule to clamp down on these was to require all local sources, no internet sources, and have the ability to go back and look at other papers the student has turned in for comparison. We'd normally bust students, then give them two or three days to turn in a paper they actually wrote with no penalties. Most of these situations were just due to being lazy and not caring (I was in the Sociology department) so it wasn't so much about cheating as it was just getting the students to think critically and write better.