How Cheating Rings Work:

Business Model: From isolated misconduct to organized cheating rings; Tiered pricing (guaranteed pass, in-person assistance, remote assistance); social proof/testimonials, learning what works and what doesn’t, extortion; Fraud services posing as study abroad agencies


Recruitment: Social media, Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and student networks


Scale: Some serve hundreds to thousands of clients per month; global reach, regional specialization.

Reaching an Audience:
For cheating organizations to succeed, they must reach a large audience. They do this by advertising on various social media and online platforms.
Some organizations might be admissions agents or tutoring companies who are operating a cheating service and posing as a legit org.

Building a Low-Cost Investigation Toolkit
Hiring investigative contractors in your top market regions
Skillset and qualifications to look for
Cost
Infiltrating cheating rings to gather intel
Social media monitoring and OSINT
Contractors acting as prospective customers
Overcoming challenges (using pseudonyms, reimbursement for fees, etc.)
Recording and organizing intel
Creating databases that capture:
Trending cheating methods
Costs per cheating attempt and per method
Scale of cheating ring
Record of communications and posts
Utilizing findings
Identifying top threats to prioritize security work
Measuring success of new security features
Relaying info to your proctoring and security teams
Strategizing how to make cheating methods more costly/difficult

Additional Efforts if Resources Allow:
Simple legal action to limit reach
Taking down social media posts
Sending Cease and Desist letters
Creating web scraping tools to monitor keywords

Summary
Security shouldn’t be a luxury item. By leaning on free tools, community intel, and smart workflows, even the most resource-limited organizations can effectively learn how people in the world are discussing their exams, bypassing security checks and profiting off their test security loopholes. More importantly, these learnings will allow a testing organization to prioritize their research, projects, and features against those who pose the biggest risk to the integrity of their exam. This session reframes test integrity as an achievable goal—not just for the well-funded, but for the well-prepared.