Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job.

At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing”, a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia.

Ms Mbugua felt conflicted.

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

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Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale.

Sleek websites – with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark – have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees.

The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine.

A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members.

After a month of training, Ms Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonise space (“it is not worth the struggle”, she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of God”, she wrote).

During her best month, she earned $320 (£260), more money than she had ever made in her life.

The New York Times is identifying Ms Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the attention would prevent her from getting future work.

Home Office failed to ensure innocent students were not wrongly detained in cheating scandal report finds

It is not clear how widely sites for paid-to-order essays, known as “contract cheating” in higher education circles, are used.

A 2005 study of students in North America found that 7 per cent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by someone else, while 3 per cent admitted to obtaining essays from essay mills.

Cath Ellis, a leading researcher on the topic, said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”

When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Centre for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of contract cheating. Now the sites are blatant.

“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”

In an email, EssayShark’s public relations department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.

“We do not condone, encourage or knowingly take part in plagiarism or any other acts of academic fraud,” it said.

A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice.

A similar effort to confront the industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States.

Universities use 'bribes' to woo students Show all 5 1 /5 Universities use 'bribes' to woo students Universities use 'bribes' to woo students pg-4-a-levels-1-pa.jpg Growing evidence is suggesting that school-leavers are seeking work rather than a university degree PA Universities use 'bribes' to woo students pg-4-a-levels-2-rex.jpg Coventry offers a £1,500 accommodation discount Rex Features Universities use 'bribes' to woo students pg-4-a-levels-3-rex.jpg Bradford offers students a £1,500 first year bursary Rex Features Universities use 'bribes' to woo students pg-4-a-levels-4-rex.jpg Lincoln offers £3,000 savings for A, A, A, B students Rex Features Universities use 'bribes' to woo students pg-4-a-levels-5.jpg Northampton is offering £2,000 per year to those who put it down as their first choice

Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states, but punishment tends to be light and enforcement rare. Experts said that no federal law in the United States, or in Kenya, forbids the purchase or sale of academic papers, although questions remain about whether the industry complies with tax laws.

“Because American institutions haven’t been whacked over the head like Australian schools were, it’s easier to pretend that it’s not happening,” said Bill Loller, vice president of product management for Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect plagiarism. “But it’s absolutely happening.”

Mr Loller said he had worked with some colleges that have students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. “They’ve contracted it all out,” he said.

Contract cheating is harder to detect than plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works – simply written by the wrong person. But this year, Turnitin rolled out a new product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues – including sentence patterns and a document’s metadata – to attempt to determine if it was written by the student who turned it in.

Some of the websites operate like eBay, with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers.

Either way, the identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from view, as are the colleges the assignments are for.

University students graduate on rollercoaster going 68mph

Still, in some of the assignments that Ms Mbugua provided to the Times, names of colleges that the essays were meant for became clear. One assignment asked students to write about a solution to a community problem, and the essay Ms Mbugua provided described difficulties with parking around Arizona State University. “Students could always just buck up and take the walk,” the paper said.

Bret Hovell, a spokesman for Arizona State University, said the school was not able to determine whether the essay had been turned in.

In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700 (£1,400), successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 (£1,600) a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for others.

Mr Ndiritu graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his “passion”. But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he began writing for others full time.

He has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in college.

“You can even get the highest level of education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.

The five best sporting cheats Show all 5 1 /5 The five best sporting cheats The five best sporting cheats Getty The five best sporting cheats Tom Watson and Gary Player Golf is the gentlemen's game and in the game's golden age these gentlemen competed like gentlemen should compete; respecting each other, congratulating each other, trusting each other… what utter codswallop. Take Tom Watson and Gary Player. The "cheating" word may well be regarded as sacriligeous in golf but in terms of this pair's relationship the verb that daren't be mentioned forms a ugly backdrop. The feud is credited as beginning back at the Canadian Open in the early Eighties, although its roots probably stretch back to an incident in the 1974 Open at Lytham which continues to threaten Player's cherished reputation.

The whisper has always been that the ball the South African played on the penultimate hole of the final round was not the ball he had hit into the thick rough. Player has always vehemently denied this, pointing out that TV cameras were trained on him and his caddie throughout the search. Nevertheless, smoke had risen. In the next decade an inferno erupted, when after a big-money skins match Watson accused Player of illegally removing a weed from behind his ball. It was not the first time, implied Watson. "He ranted that he was tired of me pulling up rooted leaves and of - quote - 'tapping down spike marks like at the Canadian Open'," recalled Player a few years later. "I though to myself 'Tom, you aren't half a man." Player's contention was that Watson hadn't brought up his supposed misdemeanour at the time and that he had already admitted, person to person, no wrong-doing on Player's behalf at the tournament in Canada, a few years earlier. Whatever, it was very all un-golf. In many respects it still isn't.

In an interview with The Independent, just before this year's Open at Turnberry - where Watson came so close to making history - Player was minded to dig up some of his adversary's dirt. "You know, [Jack] Nicklaus was feeling pretty upset when he lost a US Open by one shot to Watson, because he thought Watson didn't have the right grooves on his clubs," he said. For his part, Watson has maintained a dignified silence, although at a banquet in his honour in 1996, he did say: "There is no question that people cheat on tour. The game is a game of integrity, but you're talking about money and you're talking about livelihoods." Was he prepared to name the guilty? "We know who they are."James Corrigan. Getty The five best sporting cheats Donald Crowhurst, Sailing Cheat In the history of sporting cheats there has surely never been a plot as audacious or as tragic as that conceived by Donald Crowhurst. An amateur sailor who tried to convince everyone that he had circumnavigated the globe, his deception ended in insanity and, it is presumed, suicide.

Crowhurst was a struggling businessman desperate to finance his project to develop a radio direction-finding navigational device. The £5,000 on offer to the winner of the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a non-stop round-the-world competition, proved too tempting.

An inexperienced sailor on board a poorly tested trimaran, he set off from Teignmouth in Devon in October 1968. The eight other competitors, who had all left days and even weeks earlier, were some of the world's most acclaimed yachtsmen, including Robin Knox-Johnston, Chay Blyth, Nigel Tetley and Bernard Moitessier. Crowhurst's initial progress was painfully slow. Fearing for his own safety, he hatched a plot to cable back false reports of his progress. After six weeks at sea he reported that he had sailed a record 243 miles in one day. This was in an age before satellite communications and nobody could verify his claims. Crowhurst soon became front-page news: an amateur sailor taking on and beating the world's most perilous seas.

While Crowhurst claimed to be heading into the Southern Ocean, he was actually sailing across the South Atlantic towards the coast of Brazil. To help maintain his deceit, he cut off all ship-to-shore communications, blaming a faulty generator. Meanwhile six of the other entrants had retired, having been battered by the stormy seas, leaving just three in the race: Knox-Johnston, Tetley and Crowhurst.

In April 1969 Crowhurst broke his silence, claiming he had just rounded Cape Horn. When Tetley capsized off the Azores, with Knox-Johnston already safely home, Crowhurst was in line to take the prize for the fastest circumnavigation. The deception, however, proved too much for Crowhurst, whose logbooks revealed his increasing insanity during his lonely months at sea.

On 1 July 1969 he wrote in his final entry: "It is finished." Nine days later his yacht was found, unmanned, drifting in the mid-Atlantic. Crowhurst, it was assumed, had jumped overboard. Paul Newman. Getty The five best sporting cheats Grace the great In the matter of gamesmanship, WG Grace was both pioneer and expert. He provided a lexicon in the dark art of pushing the laws to their limits (and sometimes beyond) which today's young shavers would do well to emulate if they really want to steal a march.

Nobody but WG could have got away with the flagrant breach, which he is said to have committed frequently in minor matches, of replacing the bails after being bowled, refusing to depart and explaining to the bowler: "They have come to see me bat, not to watch you bowl."

His actions in one match in 1898, on the eve of his 50th birthday, epitomised both his competitive zeal and his great skill. Gloucestershire were playing Essex at Leyton. It was Grace's last match before the great celebration of that summer, the Gentleman v Players fixture, which had been delayed a week so its start coincided with his golden jubilee. By then, Dr William Gilbert Grace was the most famous man in England, he remains the most famous cricketer ever. Perhaps on this occasion he was overhwhelmed by the impending celebratory match anticipation of which was sweeping the country. Perhaps not.

WG was in form and in Essex's first innings he took 7 for 44. One of his wickets was that of Percy Perrin whom Grace caught and bowled and after lunging forward to take the return he turned triumphally to the umpire and said: "Not bad for an old 'un." Trouble was that everybody who witnessed it recognised that WG had taken the ball on the half volley.

But they hadn't seen anything yet. Grace batted wonderfully in his side's first innings, scoring 126 out of 231. Essex then left Gloucestershire needing 148 to win. Grace gave a return catch off Walter Mead on six and was given out. The batsman, however, stormed down the wicket and insisted that the decision was reversed.

This blatant sharp practice incensed the Essex fast bowler Charles Kortwright, one of the quickest in history. He tore into Grace. The first ball of his over hit Grace on the pad plum in front. The umpire, mesmerised it seems by Grace's stare, rejected the appeal. Next ball, Grace snicked to the keeper. The umpire was unmoved.

Third ball, Kortwright steamed in and uprooted WG's middle and leg stumps. As WG departed with thunderous face Kortwright could not resist it. "Surely, you're not going Doc, there's one stump still standing." Stephen Brenkley. Getty The five best sporting cheats Billy Meredith He is now acknowledged as "football's first superstar" but back in 1905 Billy Meredith was better known as the first villain in "football's first great bribes scandal". Imagine David Beckham going into the opposing dressing room and pulling out a £10 note from his wallet, before offering it to the opposing captain to throw the game. (Indeed, imagine Beckham carrying £10 notes in his wallet). That is exactly what Meredith did. Manchester City needed to beat Aston Villa on the last day of the season to win the title and the Welsh wizard was taking no chances. Except he had taken a chance; a huge, calamitous chance.

The Villa captain, Alex Leake, was a honest man and after a bad-natured match, which his side duly won 3-1 consigning City into third, he decided to rat on Meredith. The Football Association held an inquiry, found Meredith guilty and issued a large fine and a one-year suspension. Meredith denied the allegations and looked to his club for assistance. None was forthcoming, so the accused cranked up what was already a sensational story. Billy went public. "What was the secret of the success of the Manchester City team?," he told a newspaper. "In my opinion, the fact that the club put aside the rule that no player should receive more than four pounds a week... The team delivered the goods, the club paid for the goods delivered and both sides were satisfied." Cue outrage.

The FA had imposed the £4-a-week maximum four season earlier and rumours had circulated of City's transgressions. Once again the FA acted and after another investigation revealed the extent of the rule-breaking - City had overpaid every single one of their players. The finger was pointed at the manager, Tom Maley, who challenged the FA to investigate all of the professional clubs. "Not four would come out scatheless," he said. Somewhat wisely, many felt, the southern-based FA resisted and instead banned Maley for life, suspended all 17 City players for 18 months and hit City with such crippling fines they were forced the club to sell all their players in an auction.

Surely nobody would touch Meredith? Nobody but City's neighbours United who got him for a "steal" at £500. Meredith went on to play more than 300 games for United before returning to finish his career at, you guessed it, City. Meredith is actually in the Hall of Fame at the City of Manchester Stadium, just as he is in national hall of fames in Wales and England. Oh yeah, Billy Meredith also set up the Professional Footballers Association, who hold him up as a paragon of their profession. What a PR makeover.James Corrigan. Getty

In interviews with people in Kenya who said they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice as unethical.

As more foreign writers have joined the industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange twist on globalidation and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America” as a key goal.

Ms Mbugua, the Kenyan university student, worked for as little as $4 (£3.26) a page. She said she began carrying a notebook, jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her essays more valuable.

She lost her mother to diabetes in 2001, when she was in the second grade. She vowed to excel in school so that she would one day be able to support her younger brother and sister.

But Ms Mbugua said she loved learning, and sometimes wished that she were the one enrolled in the American universities she was writing papers for.

Independent Minds Events: get involved in the news agenda

Eventually, Ms Mbugua said, she decided to strike out on her own, and bought an account from an established writer with UvoCorp. But UvoCorp forbids such transfers, and Ms Mbugua said the account she had purchased was shut down.

Now she finds herself at a crossroads, unsure of what to do next. She graduated from her university in 2018 and has sent her CV to dozens of employers. Lately she has been selling kitchen utensils.

Ms Mbugua said she never felt right about the writing she did in the names of American students and others.

“I’ve always had somehow a guilty conscience,” she said.

“People say the education system in the US, UK and other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those students are better than us,” she said. “We have studied. We have done the assignments.”