Authorities have jailed a man after he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing assignments and taking exams for more than 120 students at Liverpool John Moore’s University. Law enforcement discovered the fraud while the 43-year-old man was leading an opulent lifestyle with several million dollars in his bank accounts.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, the man would obtain the pass codes from students at Liverpool John Moore’s University (LJMU) and complete coursework, assignments, and online examinations for them in return for payment. Police suspect that he may have done this sort of thing for 124 students at universities around the world.
How did police catch him?
Det. Sgt. Adam Dagnall, from Merseyside Police’s cyber dependant crime unit, told the BBC that a university lecturer was largely responsible for the man being caught.
Dagnall told BBC Radio Merseyside that it happened after a lecturer saw additional folders on a USB thumb drive that a computer forensics student had used to turn in assignments. The former owner had unintentionally transferred a variety of data onto the drive.
“Within that folder were other students’ names, their coursework and exams they were sitting, dates… and some monetary values,” said Dagnall.
The files also contained private login information. After further investigation, Dagnall said it was “quite obvious” that the files contained the names of students who had paid the man to take their exams.
Dagnall added that enquiries confirmed that the man “was able to log into student accounts and complete assessments for them with evidence of payments to him from students.”
He had over $3 million in his bank accounts
At the time of his arrest, the man was working as an Amazon Flex delivery driver. However, he owned two cars, an Audi and a BMW, and he had three bank accounts and a PayPal account with over $3.26 million in them.
Prosecutors charged him with counts of fraud by false representation, causing a computer to perform a function to secure or enable unauthorized access to program data, and money laundering. The court sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment on June 17.
“He created complex audit trails with his bank accounts to try and avoid detection and lived a lavish lifestyle to use up the money he made and avoid having to pay it back,” Senior Crown Prosecutor Andrew Madden of CPS Mersey Cheshire said. “He is a fraudster who wanted more than his declared employment could give him, so he turned to crime and tried to outwit the authorities.