Here’s the relevant provision of 18 USC 1343, the federal wire fraud statute, which I undershot the penalty for (20 years rather than 5):

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

Someone need not engage in copyright infringement to be guilty of wire fraud, nor need the scheme or artifice to defraud be for financial gain. Furthermore, once you have a conspiracy between the paper mill and the student, that’s 1) a separate count of conspiracy and 2) criminal culpability by the student (as a principal) for the substantive wire fraud of the co-conspirator paper mill.

RICO requires a “pattern of racketeering activity,” i.e., at least two acts of a list of about 30 predicate crimes within a 10-year period. Wire fraud is expressly among them. Therefore, I don’t think a RICO case against a paper mill is a stretch.

Unless it is a crime to have one’s work done by a ghost writer, the only issue is cheating (as if that isn’t enough!).

If someone were to pursue criminal charges with respect to the paper mills, I think that doubt would be quickly dispelled. As I noted above, even if the state-law deceptive practices violations don’t always necessarily fit, wire fraud does. That’s tens or hundreds of thousands of counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, neatly tied together as predicates under RICO. It genuinely surprises me that no one’s done this…or maybe they have and just don’t know about it?

You wait until they fall apart, as Blair Hornstine did?

A large part of this problem begins with the colleges. Many applicants are engaged in the academic and extracurricular arms race. I suspect that many applications stretch the truth when it comes to the applicants’ commitment to extracurriculars.

There’s no excuse for plagiarism and cheating, though. It’s very painful that teachers and professors must doubt students’ honesty.

I have to say that I’m not surprised. College admissions have become so competitive that to get in to a good school, students have to take on a much greater workload than many of them can actually handle.

I talked last year to one of the project leaders of my DD’s 4-H club, who was then a senior at one of the local high schools and applying to my alma mater. She was the valedictorian of her class and I was amazed by how heavy an academic schedule she was carrying on top of being on a varsity athletic team and an officer in 4-H. There’s no way I personally would’ve been able to do everything she was doing without cutting some corners here and there.

I have no idea whether she ever cheated in her quest for admission to a top college, but I have to say I would not be surprised if she did. She was clearly a bright girl and had she been taking the kind of schedule I did in my senior year, I’m pretty certain that there wouldn’t even be a doubt about possible cheating. But it’s like trying to be a clean ballplayer in the steroids era- how do you compete with all the players who are juicing up?