It’s no secret that students sell test questions, answer sheets and homework copies for under $20, but charging someone over hundreds or even thousands of dollars for one essay? That’s a pretty good cash earning method.

Yes it’s cheating, and yes it’s wrong, but people make a living off of writing an essay on The Scarlet Letter or a proposal for a business deal, because it’s easy money. According to an issue of Reader’s Digest, Ed Dante, a worker for an online company that makes thousands of dollars off of writing original essays for cheating students, made roughly around $66,000 in a year. He makes more than many educators which is pretty surprising.

Why would someone give into paying a stranger hundreds of dollars to write a paper, who probably isn’t even thoroughly educated in what subject the paper is about? As risky as it seems, there are some who actually do.

According to a New York Times article, 61% of undergraduates had confessed to some form of cheating. That includes tests and essays.

I know some people who pay others to write their papers, and most of them use the excuse of being “too busy” to write it themselves. Obviously, the more legitimate reason would be “too lazy.” If essay writers like Dante, however, make loads of cash through people who have money to blow, then good for them.

Unfortunately, there are teachers and professors who pass off these students with an “A,” without even questioning how their work suddenly progressed from writing they did on their own. English teacher Stephanie Sajjadieh feels that she may or may not have been fooled by her own students. “It’s possible that I’ve been fooled, but that’s why I lean more towards in class essays rather than ones done at home,” she said.

Sajjadieh, like many other teachers, requires many of her assignments to be submitted onto a website called Turnitin.com. The website is used to detect any type of plagiarism on the assignments submitted, and even provides the sources that matches the flagged section(s). After a few minutes of processing the assignment, Turnitin provides a percentage that was detected for plagiarism.

According to bizjournals’s article on plagiarism detection, Turnitin.com uses 45 billion websites, 350 million-plus documents submitted over time by students, and 130 million articles accessiblle in 19 languages and 100-plus countries to check for plagarism.

This entire service was recently sold for $752 million to Insight Venture Partners and the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. Although the amount of sources and money investested are abundant to catch cheaters, writers like Dante still get away with their work, claiming that each paper they write is given an “original sense.”

Sajjadieh is more disappointed that the option of cheating even exists. “I think we’ve come into a society that influences this sort of cheating,” she said. “Student who desire to get into a college so badly sometimes result to such desperate measures.”