Woman earns £100,000 helping students cheat

A woman who earns £100,000 a year helping students cheat their way to everything from degrees to PhDs has said she doesn't care if people think she is a 'degenerate'.

Dorit Chomer, 50, lives a life of luxury by selling thousands of essays, papers and dissertations for fees ranging from £50 to £2,000.

From a spare room at her ?1 million home in Finchley, she controls an empire which has become one of Britain's most prolific sources of plagiarised material used by students from every walk of life.

Such is the demand for her work she employs 10 staff, including four personal assistants, and even gets her two teenage sons to help write papers for clients.

Ms Chomer also employs up to four canvassers at any time to tour every university in Britain and Ireland handing out promotional material.

With up to 1,000 orders a week, she claims she maintains a database of more than 1,000 "specialists", ranging from graduates to sitting professors and boasts she can provide a piece of work on any subject to any standard. With students taking law, accounting, economics, engineering and mathematics already regular customers, Ms Chomer is planning a campaign to persuade medical students to pay her to do their work.

Despite admitting the "terrifying" potential consequences of her work, Ms Chomer has few qualms about her business and insists she is not breaking any laws. She said: "The argument would have to be that if I do not do it then somebody else will. I am branching out into medicine and that is scary, but there is already another person out there providing this service to medical students.

"If people want to call me a degenerate then that is fine, I am, but I am making a fine living from being one. Basically I work hard so other people can be lazy."

Ms Chomer, a single mother of an 11-year-old girl and two boys aged 14 and 16, started helping students cheat 20 years ago. After getting a first-class law degree, she became a solicitor but quit after a year to become a personal law tutor.

"One day a mother of one pupil came to me, begged me to do her son's work for him and handed me £500," she said. "I said it was unethical, but she persisted and eventually I agreed to closely guide him through the work. I started doing that for more pupils until it got to the point that I thought I might as well do the essays myself - so I did.

"I just milked it after that - I realised I was on to a good thing. Within 18 months I had given up the teaching. Around that time universities started making coursework compulsory and the business took off.

"I would send adverts to law department secretaries and they would actually pin them up on the official notice boards for me."

When Ms Chomer moved the business onto the internet the number of orders exploded and she found she was no longer able to write all the work herself, so started building a database of corrupt academics.

"All the researchers are in the picture," she said. "The whole system is corrupt to its core, but I am not breaking any laws.

"I have had one of my lecturers set a question and his student come to me to produce the essay. I give the work back to the lecturer, they write it, I give it to the student who hands it back to the lecturer who ends up marking his own work."

Research by the Joint Information Systems Committee, a government agency which helps universities combat plagiarism, found nearly a quarter of students admitted copying chunks of other people's work and passing them off as their own.

A JISC spokesman said: "There is no law against the people who run essay services of this kind. Stopping this is a big challenge."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said: " Universities are responsible for the setting of their exams and the maintenance of their standards. It is in their interests to ensure students are meeting the proper standards."