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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. The cryptocurrency market has been on a roller
coaster ride this past week, with Bitcoin and other cryptos
taken a dip in the middle of the week, rebounding
the next day. It's been pretty volatile. But we also
heard about a report from the FTC about cryptocurrency scams
and how they spit one thousand percent in the past year.
(00:49):
This costs about seventy thousand people more than eighty million dollars. Interestingly,
when we hear a lot about money scams, it's usually
with older people, but in this crypto market, we're seeing
these scams happen among people ages. If anyone's asking you
to pay by cryptocurrency wire transfer, or a gift card,
it's most likely going to be a scammer. So watch
(01:11):
out for more on how these cryptocurrency scammers are cashing in.
We'll speak to Kate Marino, business editor at Axios. I
think the long and short of it is that when
people see other people out there making a lot of
money on crypto UM, the fear of missing out the
fomo makes them exceptionally vulnerable to these scammers UM and
(01:34):
scam artists certainly know that, and they see it in
the headlines and they kind of identify that this is
this is an easy area to target people in UM,
and the huge uptick in scams and reported losses really
just goes right along with UM the uptick in prices
(01:55):
of say Bitcoin. If you look at the price chart
over the six months, you see, you know, huge up
into the right over the past six months, and that's
kind of when all the scams really started to multiply
UM and come out in full force. So it's really
just kind of a no grainer tied to that. Yeah,
and you mentioned kind of this fomo aspect of it.
(02:17):
We saw a bunch of stuff happening with game stock,
doage coin. You know, obviously Bitcoin figures into all of
this stuff, and a lot of times when we hear
about money scams, we think about older people maybe don't
know what's going on as much. Uh. The FTC who
produced a report talking about a lot of these scams,
they said that most of the people that were being
scammed were between the ages of twenty and forty nine,
(02:39):
so scowing a lot younger than the normal money scams
we're seeing out there. Yeah, that's absolutely true, and that
kind of lines up with UM just what I've been
observing in the market, which is that a lot of
this FOMO investing is really driven by online groups and
by you know, app and new technologies. So it's really
(03:01):
something that more of a younger crowd UM is involved in,
and really in the online chat group is a huge
part of where UM the scammers kind of like find
their victims and gain the trust of people. UM. So
that's sort of aligned with the younger demographic. Yeah, let's
talk about some of those scams and how they work.
(03:21):
As I mentioned, there was a bunch of scams that
were where there was a fake elon Musk asking for investments,
and then there was a lot of this happening on
dating apps too. Yeah, I mean I think that the
online dating it's literally it's just yet another iteration of
like the cat fishing kind of do you actually know
(03:42):
who you're dating? Um, if you haven't met them in person,
it might be a scam. Um. And this is just
one other way in which, you know, somebody tries to
gain your trust online and then you know, after they
gain your trust, they're like, oh, hey, you know, like
I've got this tip or this investment, you know, say
send your bitcoin over here and you're gonna make lots
(04:02):
of money. It's it's kind of just you know, one more,
one more aspect of that uh that's playing out. Even
saw some some of these scams that people said involved
the Social Security Administration, which you know, if they're ever
asking for anything, it's probably a scam. You know. They
don't reach out Yeah, like cool amunis hasn't gotten a
(04:25):
weird phone call on your cell phone saying that you
owe the Social Security Administration of the I R S. Money.
It's like, don't listen to those. I mean, they like
strictly reach out to you by mail. Old school mail
is the only way the Social Security Administration reaches out
to you. So anything else is most likely going to
be a scam. And and then, like I said on
(04:46):
the Elon musk side, I think people were just given
links to about Tesla saying they're going to be giving
away half of their steak in bitcoin and send in
some money, so maybe you can get involved in all
of this. And and really it was just kind of
the promise of bigger investments being paid out to you
if you gave them a little bit of money. And
you know, one of the things why people love cryptocurrency
(05:08):
so much is that the transactions are largely anonymous, but
in this case it helps those scammers because it's just
so hard to trace back if you do lose some
money out of this exactly exactly, And you know, scammers
like to glom onto some kind of a celebrity name
to just gain attention to whatever the scam is. Um
(05:29):
and UM. I don't know if you've said this figure before,
but apparently the FTC said in the last six months
that people sent over two million dollars to just to
Elon musk impersonators um, which is a lot um. So yeah,
I mean the takeaway is that to make money from
any kind of cryptocurrency it's just invest in the cryptocurrency itself,
(05:53):
don't you know, like send crypto somewhere thinking you're going
to get more back or you know, do anything else
with it. It's just invest in it, and you know
you might have some ups and downs, but you've got
to be ready for that, for that ride. But that's
that's the only thing. Right from that FTC report, they
said since October, people reported total losses of more than
(06:15):
eighty million dollars in crypto related scams. So that's a
lot of money for for a lot of people. More
generally though, about cryptocurrencies, UM, you know, we've been seeing
them have such a big rise and interest in trading,
and but we've seen how volatile those ups and downs are.
Why is it hitting this moment right now? I mean,
(06:36):
I think it's really just in the kind of as
you mentioned with like the meme stocks and the Reddit
trades with game stop and am C and others. It's
kind of this gamification and democratization of kind of like
anyone having access to this potential gold mine investment UM,
(06:57):
Whereas before technology enabled that UM, people didn't have as
much access UM. And you know, the other thing is
people have had a lot of time on their hands
UM throughout the pandemic. UM, So they're not going out
as much. They're you know, sitting at home online, they're
(07:17):
on apps, So what do I do? UM? And everyone's
financial situation is a little different as a result of
the pandemic. You know, some people maybe UM lost their
job and they're trying to make money on the side,
or they got a stimulus check and are trying to
put that to use. UM. Other people that are not,
you know, financially strapped, it might just be more like, oh,
(07:39):
I've got extra money, you know, what should I do
with it? Let me put it into bitcoin or something.
So the pandemic has driven behavior in many different ways,
and that phono aspect is real. You know, people see
others making some some gains and they want to do
it too and hitch that ride to the moon. So
it's exactly definitely having that moment right now. Kate Marino,
(08:02):
business editor at Axios, Thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks so much finally for this week. As students spent
more than a year at home in remote learning settings,
cheating has become more rampant and easier than ever. Educators
say a big part of why this is rising is
(08:22):
stress and pressure during the pandemic, and a lot of
the cheating is being done on homework help and homework
auction sites. This is where students can post their assignments
and people bid on completing them for a price. And
one of the kickers of all this is that these
students are getting very gutsy as well if they don't
get the grade that the auction site promised that they'd get.
Sometimes they contact the Better Business Bureau and complain to
(08:44):
them saying they didn't get that promise grade. This whole
thing of online cheating has even boosted another industry, surveillance
type companies that hire online proctors to watch students take
tests from home. For more on the latest surgeon cheating,
will speak to Tanel Hobbes, Senior special writer at The
Wall Street Journal. There is a lot of this site
and I talked to quite a few and they said
(09:06):
they have gained millions of new users during the pandemic,
and in talking to students and reaching out to them
through social media, I started to becoming aware of these
auction sites where they can actually put their work up
for auction, and you have people that bid on it,
and it's almost like yelp for cheaters. These people have ratings.
(09:27):
You don't have to go with the lowest bidder. You
can go with the person who's got a great track
record of doing mathwork. The pitch on one of these
websites that says, consider hiring me to do your assignment.
I work fast, pay close attention to the instructions, and
deliver a plagiarism free paper. I mean, the plagiarism free
thing is big. They're selling themselves to, as you mentioned,
(09:49):
to the students that want to help with the homework
and the these assignments. Let's talk a little bit about
this because in North Carolina State University there was a
teacher who was concerned about this and kind of at
a like a mini sting operation, almost tell us how
he found out his students were cheating and how many
because there was a lot, There was a lot, and
actually at the end of it, he was really surprised
(10:11):
at how many there were. He had suspected some cheating
was going on just doing what he does, he's looking
at grades and things like that. So what he did
he had access to a computer program and in the
students didn't realize this. Each exam was different, whether it
was just a word or two different in the question.
So once he gave that exam and those questions started
(10:32):
popping up on one certain side, it was the check
study site, and check is you know, some students choose
it the right way. Some students don't obviously, but once
the questions started popping up there, he's like, wow, and
Check is one of the outfits that actually prides itself
on trying to help stop cheating. So what Check end
up doing. You know, they worked with Tyler Johnson, that's
(10:54):
the coordinator of the class, and he was able to
see that it didn't just catch students posted, but it
also was able to tell those who actually looked at
the answers. So even if you didn't post, it's like,
oh my classmate already posted, let me just look at
the answer. So they got those people too. Yeah, he
found about two hundred students were caught and it was
(11:14):
one four of the class. That's just at North Carolina
State University, Texas, A and M. They had a fifty
increase in cheating of investigations in University of Pennsylvania. Even
West Point had dozens of cadets cheating so I mean,
when you're not in classroom settings, these things become so
(11:35):
much easier. Let's talk about that industry than this kind
of work for higher homework for higher type thing. Because
you guys did something really interesting there at the Wall
Street Journal. You put out your own bid or something
basically saying, hey, you know the Wall Street Journals looking
for help cheating for an article. How did that go? Well?
(11:55):
The reason where we did that because I wanted to
see how easy is it to do this? And obviously
we are media company, so we had to let them know, hey,
we're doing this for a story, We're not paying you
and all of this stuff. But as soon as we
posted just saying hey, Wall Street Journal is looking for
help cheating, and they started bidding, and the bids ranged
(12:16):
I think it was like from fifteen dollars and then
somebody said that they would help us if we gave
them two thousand. But it was it was fast, I mean,
did started coming in fast, and we end up pulling
it down, like after about thirty minutes we stopped the auction.
But it was just that easy for me to go
on there. I don't even think it took not even
a minute and a half for me to post the assignment. Yeah,
(12:38):
and I mean obviously people responding right away. They're not
even reading it. They're just trying to get whatever quote
unquote work they can at that point. The other thing
that we saw an increase in is kind of surveillance
type companies that hire online proctors to watch students taking
tests from home. So cheating has gotten so bad, they
need to watch the students from home so they can
(12:59):
make sure they don't do it. And there's all sorts
of stuff that goes into that too, facial recognition stuff
to catch eyes wondering how how does that work. That
can be kind of contentious actually, because you obviously now
have a person in many cases watching a student through
a webcam. But I've noticed it at the college level especially,
(13:20):
that's what they're going to get these exams done, you know,
the colleges that aren't a session at all, or the
students that are back on campus, they want to test
them and they said, well, we're going to hire these
productors to do this, and that has been contentious, but
those companies are growing big time. They're growing just as
(13:40):
much as the companies that students are using to cheat.
So Okay, the overarching question, why are students cheating? It's
happened forever. I mean, cheating has always been gone on
as long as school has gone on. Maybe a student
is unprepared, who knows whatever. But when you're at home,
you have your even your own classroom materials. I mean,
it seems like it's much easier. But a lot of
(14:01):
people are pointing to obviously the stress and pressure due
to the pandemic. I heard that more than anything from students.
It was the stress, it was the pressure. It was
just sometimes they just felt lost. It's a lot different
being in that physical classroom and being able to raise
your hand or maybe you look confused in the teacher
and notices that some of them just felt like they
(14:22):
fell behind. And then some of them quite frankly said,
where in the pandemic, anything goes, we should be able
to use whatever resources we need to make this work.
I got quite a few of that people that said that,
you know, I mean, I can sympathize with a little
bit of anything goes in the pandemic, but this is
a specific situation. You're learning, you're trying to get your education.
(14:42):
You're obviously skirting that you're not learning. If you're contracting
someone else to do it, that's right. And you know
what I tell the students, it's like, oh, so you
cheated all the Spanish one when you go back to
school in person, how are you going to be ready
for Spanish too? Right? Exactly when you're like to move on? Um.
And then there's the and they might have to keep
doing it. So there's that, if you could indulge me
(15:04):
for a second, because unfortunately I found it kind of funny.
But there was some unique new ways that students were cheating,
including wearing wigs, using drones. What did what did you
find out regarding that? Yes, well, every time I would
talk to one of the property companies, I just wanted
to kind of find out, Hey, what ways are they cheating?
And some of the ways were just so, you know,
(15:26):
I'm like, wow, these kids are getting great using a
drone too. You know, the drones have the cameras and
beaming the drone dale so that the drone can take
a picture, you know, so they could send it all
or sell the questions or whatever. And then the wind
thing was interesting because apparently there was a female student
she was taking a test and she ended up sneezing
(15:47):
and she got off camera. Next thing, you know, there's
a mail wearing a wig trying to impersonator and uh so, yeah,
there was some mean that was the one that got me. Yeah,
they have been really shocked. Let's move on a little
bit then. So what's happening too is on the flip side,
the students right there using these services. Sometimes the product
(16:09):
is not that great, so they're not getting the grades
that they quote unquote wanted to pay for. And then
they're getting gutsy. They're going to the Better Business Bureau
and trying to throw these companies under the bus saying
that they're you know, the product is not there, so
they're cheating and complaining about it. Yeah, that was shocking
to me. And I found out about that because I
had talked to a student that said and she had said,
(16:29):
I'm going to the Better Business Beer because the Freedom
Mince did that. So I decided to check with the
Better Business Beer and sure enough, they were complained and
then there was a lot of complaints and it was
shocking and a lot of complaints. You know, students said
they were promised, they were assured that they would have
an a and there are some of these people that
do this, and they will assure you a certain great
I've seen students that say, you get a bonus if
(16:52):
I get an A that's twenty more dollars. So these kids,
they were complaining to the better business where that they
didn't get the great promise or it was plagiarized. A
lot of these people assure you that they will not
plagiarize the work because some of the universities, especially also
in the schools, they can run this assignment through this
(17:12):
plagiarism software. That's the reason why the kids always say
it has to be unique so it will not get
caught up in the plagiarism software. When they get caught
up in that, they will complain to the better business.
We're about that too, okay. And the last part of
this going back to the example of Tyler Johnson at
North Carolina State University, they caught two hundred students. They
gave them three options with how to deal with this.
(17:35):
Either come clean, fight it with whatever administration there at
the school, or meet with the teacher and try to
hash something out. How did that go? Most of the
kids there were I guess probably half of the kids
decided to do the zoom meeting with the teacher and
basically what he said that he's a coordinator, what he
once he laid it out for them, they just kind
(17:56):
of said, okay, you got us. There were about thirty
to thirty five of them that took their chances in
a hearing process, and only one of them was fully vindicated,
so the vast majority of those kids got punished. Now,
he found evidence that some kids were using another cheating
site to cheat, but he said, unfortunately that cheating site
(18:18):
did not cooperate with the university, so there was actually
more than the two hundred he suspects that cheating is
just they didn't get cooperation from the other cheating site. Wow,
just kind of an unfortunate side story to all of this.
As you mentioned, a lot of them said, anything goes
in the pandemic, and this kind of just seemed primed
to happen while students are all remote learning. So just
(18:38):
an interesting look, and you know, we'll see how this increases,
how this changes when kids go back to school, and
how prepared they are, so we'll monitor all of you.
You know, the educators are, they're really worried about it
because some of these kids haven't been in a physical
classroom for a year, and you have some students who
will tell you, Nope, I use this and this the
whole time. How are they going to be ready algebra
(19:00):
two if they didn't do their work for algebra one? Exactly?
Tan L. Hobbs, Senior Special writer at The Law Street Journal,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for
having me. That's it for this weekend. Be sure to
check out The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join
us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter
(19:22):
and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment,
give us a rating, and tell us the stories that
you're interested in. Follow The Daily Dive and I Heart
Radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode
of The Daily Dive has been engineered by Tony Sargentina.
I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this was your
Daily Dive weekend addition.
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. The cryptocurrency market has been on a roller
coaster ride this past week, with Bitcoin and other cryptos
taken a dip in the middle of the week, rebounding
the next day. It's been pretty volatile. But we also
heard about a report from the FTC about cryptocurrency scams
and how they spit one thousand percent in the past year.
(00:49):
This costs about seventy thousand people more than eighty million dollars. Interestingly,
when we hear a lot about money scams, it's usually
with older people, but in this crypto market, we're seeing
these scams happen among people ages. If anyone's asking you
to pay by cryptocurrency wire transfer, or a gift card,
it's most likely going to be a scammer. So watch
(01:11):
out for more on how these cryptocurrency scammers are cashing in.
We'll speak to Kate Marino, business editor at Axios. I
think the long and short of it is that when
people see other people out there making a lot of
money on crypto UM, the fear of missing out the
fomo makes them exceptionally vulnerable to these scammers UM and
(01:34):
scam artists certainly know that, and they see it in
the headlines and they kind of identify that this is
this is an easy area to target people in UM,
and the huge uptick in scams and reported losses really
just goes right along with UM the uptick in prices
(01:55):
of say Bitcoin. If you look at the price chart
over the six months, you see, you know, huge up
into the right over the past six months, and that's
kind of when all the scams really started to multiply
UM and come out in full force. So it's really
just kind of a no grainer tied to that. Yeah,
and you mentioned kind of this fomo aspect of it.
(02:17):
We saw a bunch of stuff happening with game stock,
doage coin. You know, obviously Bitcoin figures into all of
this stuff, and a lot of times when we hear
about money scams, we think about older people maybe don't
know what's going on as much. Uh. The FTC who
produced a report talking about a lot of these scams,
they said that most of the people that were being
scammed were between the ages of twenty and forty nine,
(02:39):
so scowing a lot younger than the normal money scams
we're seeing out there. Yeah, that's absolutely true, and that
kind of lines up with UM just what I've been
observing in the market, which is that a lot of
this FOMO investing is really driven by online groups and
by you know, app and new technologies. So it's really
(03:01):
something that more of a younger crowd UM is involved in,
and really in the online chat group is a huge
part of where UM the scammers kind of like find
their victims and gain the trust of people. UM. So
that's sort of aligned with the younger demographic. Yeah, let's
talk about some of those scams and how they work.
(03:21):
As I mentioned, there was a bunch of scams that
were where there was a fake elon Musk asking for investments,
and then there was a lot of this happening on
dating apps too. Yeah, I mean I think that the
online dating it's literally it's just yet another iteration of
like the cat fishing kind of do you actually know
(03:42):
who you're dating? Um, if you haven't met them in person,
it might be a scam. Um. And this is just
one other way in which, you know, somebody tries to
gain your trust online and then you know, after they
gain your trust, they're like, oh, hey, you know, like
I've got this tip or this investment, you know, say
send your bitcoin over here and you're gonna make lots
(04:02):
of money. It's it's kind of just you know, one more,
one more aspect of that uh that's playing out. Even
saw some some of these scams that people said involved
the Social Security Administration, which you know, if they're ever
asking for anything, it's probably a scam. You know. They
don't reach out Yeah, like cool amunis hasn't gotten a
(04:25):
weird phone call on your cell phone saying that you
owe the Social Security Administration of the I R S. Money.
It's like, don't listen to those. I mean, they like
strictly reach out to you by mail. Old school mail
is the only way the Social Security Administration reaches out
to you. So anything else is most likely going to
be a scam. And and then, like I said on
(04:46):
the Elon musk side, I think people were just given
links to about Tesla saying they're going to be giving
away half of their steak in bitcoin and send in
some money, so maybe you can get involved in all
of this. And and really it was just kind of
the promise of bigger investments being paid out to you
if you gave them a little bit of money. And
you know, one of the things why people love cryptocurrency
(05:08):
so much is that the transactions are largely anonymous, but
in this case it helps those scammers because it's just
so hard to trace back if you do lose some
money out of this exactly exactly, And you know, scammers
like to glom onto some kind of a celebrity name
to just gain attention to whatever the scam is. Um
(05:29):
and UM. I don't know if you've said this figure before,
but apparently the FTC said in the last six months
that people sent over two million dollars to just to
Elon musk impersonators um, which is a lot um. So yeah,
I mean the takeaway is that to make money from
any kind of cryptocurrency it's just invest in the cryptocurrency itself,
(05:53):
don't you know, like send crypto somewhere thinking you're going
to get more back or you know, do anything else
with it. It's just invest in it, and you know
you might have some ups and downs, but you've got
to be ready for that, for that ride. But that's
that's the only thing. Right from that FTC report, they
said since October, people reported total losses of more than
(06:15):
eighty million dollars in crypto related scams. So that's a
lot of money for for a lot of people. More
generally though, about cryptocurrencies, UM, you know, we've been seeing
them have such a big rise and interest in trading,
and but we've seen how volatile those ups and downs are.
Why is it hitting this moment right now? I mean,
(06:36):
I think it's really just in the kind of as
you mentioned with like the meme stocks and the Reddit
trades with game stop and am C and others. It's
kind of this gamification and democratization of kind of like
anyone having access to this potential gold mine investment UM,
(06:57):
Whereas before technology enabled that UM, people didn't have as
much access UM. And you know, the other thing is
people have had a lot of time on their hands
UM throughout the pandemic. UM, So they're not going out
as much. They're you know, sitting at home online, they're
(07:17):
on apps, So what do I do? UM? And everyone's
financial situation is a little different as a result of
the pandemic. You know, some people maybe UM lost their
job and they're trying to make money on the side,
or they got a stimulus check and are trying to
put that to use. UM. Other people that are not,
you know, financially strapped, it might just be more like, oh,
(07:39):
I've got extra money, you know, what should I do
with it? Let me put it into bitcoin or something.
So the pandemic has driven behavior in many different ways,
and that phono aspect is real. You know, people see
others making some some gains and they want to do
it too and hitch that ride to the moon. So
it's exactly definitely having that moment right now. Kate Marino,
(08:02):
business editor at Axios, Thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks so much finally for this week. As students spent
more than a year at home in remote learning settings,
cheating has become more rampant and easier than ever. Educators
say a big part of why this is rising is
(08:22):
stress and pressure during the pandemic, and a lot of
the cheating is being done on homework help and homework
auction sites. This is where students can post their assignments
and people bid on completing them for a price. And
one of the kickers of all this is that these
students are getting very gutsy as well if they don't
get the grade that the auction site promised that they'd get.
Sometimes they contact the Better Business Bureau and complain to
(08:44):
them saying they didn't get that promise grade. This whole
thing of online cheating has even boosted another industry, surveillance
type companies that hire online proctors to watch students take
tests from home. For more on the latest surgeon cheating,
will speak to Tanel Hobbes, Senior special writer at The
Wall Street Journal. There is a lot of this site
and I talked to quite a few and they said
(09:06):
they have gained millions of new users during the pandemic,
and in talking to students and reaching out to them
through social media, I started to becoming aware of these
auction sites where they can actually put their work up
for auction, and you have people that bid on it,
and it's almost like yelp for cheaters. These people have ratings.
(09:27):
You don't have to go with the lowest bidder. You
can go with the person who's got a great track
record of doing mathwork. The pitch on one of these
websites that says, consider hiring me to do your assignment.
I work fast, pay close attention to the instructions, and
deliver a plagiarism free paper. I mean, the plagiarism free
thing is big. They're selling themselves to, as you mentioned,
(09:49):
to the students that want to help with the homework
and the these assignments. Let's talk a little bit about
this because in North Carolina State University there was a
teacher who was concerned about this and kind of at
a like a mini sting operation, almost tell us how
he found out his students were cheating and how many
because there was a lot, There was a lot, and
actually at the end of it, he was really surprised
(10:11):
at how many there were. He had suspected some cheating
was going on just doing what he does, he's looking
at grades and things like that. So what he did
he had access to a computer program and in the
students didn't realize this. Each exam was different, whether it
was just a word or two different in the question.
So once he gave that exam and those questions started
(10:32):
popping up on one certain side, it was the check
study site, and check is you know, some students choose
it the right way. Some students don't obviously, but once
the questions started popping up there, he's like, wow, and
Check is one of the outfits that actually prides itself
on trying to help stop cheating. So what Check end
up doing. You know, they worked with Tyler Johnson, that's
(10:54):
the coordinator of the class, and he was able to
see that it didn't just catch students posted, but it
also was able to tell those who actually looked at
the answers. So even if you didn't post, it's like,
oh my classmate already posted, let me just look at
the answer. So they got those people too. Yeah, he
found about two hundred students were caught and it was
(11:14):
one four of the class. That's just at North Carolina
State University, Texas, A and M. They had a fifty
increase in cheating of investigations in University of Pennsylvania. Even
West Point had dozens of cadets cheating so I mean,
when you're not in classroom settings, these things become so
(11:35):
much easier. Let's talk about that industry than this kind
of work for higher homework for higher type thing. Because
you guys did something really interesting there at the Wall
Street Journal. You put out your own bid or something
basically saying, hey, you know the Wall Street Journals looking
for help cheating for an article. How did that go? Well?
(11:55):
The reason where we did that because I wanted to
see how easy is it to do this? And obviously
we are media company, so we had to let them know, hey,
we're doing this for a story, We're not paying you
and all of this stuff. But as soon as we
posted just saying hey, Wall Street Journal is looking for
help cheating, and they started bidding, and the bids ranged
(12:16):
I think it was like from fifteen dollars and then
somebody said that they would help us if we gave
them two thousand. But it was it was fast, I mean,
did started coming in fast, and we end up pulling
it down, like after about thirty minutes we stopped the auction.
But it was just that easy for me to go
on there. I don't even think it took not even
a minute and a half for me to post the assignment. Yeah,
(12:38):
and I mean obviously people responding right away. They're not
even reading it. They're just trying to get whatever quote
unquote work they can at that point. The other thing
that we saw an increase in is kind of surveillance
type companies that hire online proctors to watch students taking
tests from home. So cheating has gotten so bad, they
need to watch the students from home so they can
(12:59):
make sure they don't do it. And there's all sorts
of stuff that goes into that too, facial recognition stuff
to catch eyes wondering how how does that work. That
can be kind of contentious actually, because you obviously now
have a person in many cases watching a student through
a webcam. But I've noticed it at the college level especially,
(13:20):
that's what they're going to get these exams done, you know,
the colleges that aren't a session at all, or the
students that are back on campus, they want to test
them and they said, well, we're going to hire these
productors to do this, and that has been contentious, but
those companies are growing big time. They're growing just as
(13:40):
much as the companies that students are using to cheat.
So Okay, the overarching question, why are students cheating? It's
happened forever. I mean, cheating has always been gone on
as long as school has gone on. Maybe a student
is unprepared, who knows whatever. But when you're at home,
you have your even your own classroom materials. I mean,
it seems like it's much easier. But a lot of
(14:01):
people are pointing to obviously the stress and pressure due
to the pandemic. I heard that more than anything from students.
It was the stress, it was the pressure. It was
just sometimes they just felt lost. It's a lot different
being in that physical classroom and being able to raise
your hand or maybe you look confused in the teacher
and notices that some of them just felt like they
(14:22):
fell behind. And then some of them quite frankly said,
where in the pandemic, anything goes, we should be able
to use whatever resources we need to make this work.
I got quite a few of that people that said that,
you know, I mean, I can sympathize with a little
bit of anything goes in the pandemic, but this is
a specific situation. You're learning, you're trying to get your education.
(14:42):
You're obviously skirting that you're not learning. If you're contracting
someone else to do it, that's right. And you know
what I tell the students, it's like, oh, so you
cheated all the Spanish one when you go back to
school in person, how are you going to be ready
for Spanish too? Right? Exactly when you're like to move on? Um.
And then there's the and they might have to keep
doing it. So there's that, if you could indulge me
(15:04):
for a second, because unfortunately I found it kind of funny.
But there was some unique new ways that students were cheating,
including wearing wigs, using drones. What did what did you
find out regarding that? Yes, well, every time I would
talk to one of the property companies, I just wanted
to kind of find out, Hey, what ways are they cheating?
And some of the ways were just so, you know,
(15:26):
I'm like, wow, these kids are getting great using a
drone too. You know, the drones have the cameras and
beaming the drone dale so that the drone can take
a picture, you know, so they could send it all
or sell the questions or whatever. And then the wind
thing was interesting because apparently there was a female student
she was taking a test and she ended up sneezing
(15:47):
and she got off camera. Next thing, you know, there's
a mail wearing a wig trying to impersonator and uh so, yeah,
there was some mean that was the one that got me. Yeah,
they have been really shocked. Let's move on a little
bit then. So what's happening too is on the flip side,
the students right there using these services. Sometimes the product
(16:09):
is not that great, so they're not getting the grades
that they quote unquote wanted to pay for. And then
they're getting gutsy. They're going to the Better Business Bureau
and trying to throw these companies under the bus saying
that they're you know, the product is not there, so
they're cheating and complaining about it. Yeah, that was shocking
to me. And I found out about that because I
had talked to a student that said and she had said,
(16:29):
I'm going to the Better Business Beer because the Freedom
Mince did that. So I decided to check with the
Better Business Beer and sure enough, they were complained and
then there was a lot of complaints and it was
shocking and a lot of complaints. You know, students said
they were promised, they were assured that they would have
an a and there are some of these people that
do this, and they will assure you a certain great
I've seen students that say, you get a bonus if
(16:52):
I get an A that's twenty more dollars. So these kids,
they were complaining to the better business where that they
didn't get the great promise or it was plagiarized. A
lot of these people assure you that they will not
plagiarize the work because some of the universities, especially also
in the schools, they can run this assignment through this
(17:12):
plagiarism software. That's the reason why the kids always say
it has to be unique so it will not get
caught up in the plagiarism software. When they get caught
up in that, they will complain to the better business.
We're about that too, okay. And the last part of
this going back to the example of Tyler Johnson at
North Carolina State University, they caught two hundred students. They
gave them three options with how to deal with this.
(17:35):
Either come clean, fight it with whatever administration there at
the school, or meet with the teacher and try to
hash something out. How did that go? Most of the
kids there were I guess probably half of the kids
decided to do the zoom meeting with the teacher and
basically what he said that he's a coordinator, what he
once he laid it out for them, they just kind
(17:56):
of said, okay, you got us. There were about thirty
to thirty five of them that took their chances in
a hearing process, and only one of them was fully vindicated,
so the vast majority of those kids got punished. Now,
he found evidence that some kids were using another cheating
site to cheat, but he said, unfortunately that cheating site
(18:18):
did not cooperate with the university, so there was actually
more than the two hundred he suspects that cheating is
just they didn't get cooperation from the other cheating site. Wow,
just kind of an unfortunate side story to all of this.
As you mentioned, a lot of them said, anything goes
in the pandemic, and this kind of just seemed primed
to happen while students are all remote learning. So just
(18:38):
an interesting look, and you know, we'll see how this increases,
how this changes when kids go back to school, and
how prepared they are, so we'll monitor all of you.
You know, the educators are, they're really worried about it
because some of these kids haven't been in a physical
classroom for a year, and you have some students who
will tell you, Nope, I use this and this the
whole time. How are they going to be ready algebra
(19:00):
two if they didn't do their work for algebra one? Exactly?
Tan L. Hobbs, Senior Special writer at The Law Street Journal,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for
having me. That's it for this weekend. Be sure to
check out The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join
us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter
(19:22):
and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment,
give us a rating, and tell us the stories that
you're interested in. Follow The Daily Dive and I Heart
Radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode
of The Daily Dive has been engineered by Tony Sargentina.
I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this was your
Daily Dive weekend addition.
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