Melinda Rieboldt’s kids were Googling her name for fun when they found it: A college paper she had helped write as part of a group project while pursuing an MBA. It was available on at least five websites that sell research papers to students.

Rieboldt, who graduated last year from the University of Phoenix in Pleasanton, Calif., doesn’t know how the websites got the paper, on the topic of global communications. Nor, she says, do her five co-authors.

“None of us did it,” she says. But they’re not pleased. The course was a lot of work, she says. Now, someone else is “making a profit.”

Rieboldt isn’t the first person to wonder if there isn’t something illegal about that. But with few exceptions, and for a variety of practical and legal reasons, term-paper mills have mostly managed to stay out of legal trouble, says Stetson University School of Law Dean Darby Dickerson. She notes in a Villanova Law Review article that cheating and plagiarism “are as common on college campuses as dirty laundry and beer.”

Seen at USA Today