I reached one more branch out to her, in the form of misspelling the name of the god of destruction as a liquor brand. But it wasn't enough to get her to tell me to fuck myself, so I started making up my plan. Which was real simple: Take her money and cut and paste a paper together from the internet that was so obviously plagiarised that she'd be guaranteed to get caught. And then, if I was able to get the information out of her, I'd report her to whatever her school was, and who knows, maybe even pump her for double money in exchange for not turning her in. Either way, I'd eventually be writing the story up in this blog, and sending her the link to it.
Is this harsh? Eh, I don't think so. She got the syllabus saying she'd be kicked out of school for plagiarism, so she shouldn't be surprised. Plus, I have a nice little English degree that I did all the work for myself, so I find it a little offensive that this girl for whom money is no object is buying papers like that.
Via theferrett [1] , “Laura K. Krishna is a Plagiarist [2]”
The paper read like something I might try to get away with [3], but at least I would be the one doing the writing, not a professional comedy writer out to destroy my college career (I can do that perfectly well on my own thank you very much).
I also don't think Nate was out of line for what he did—he did give Laura several clues that he himself was clueless about Hinduism (the given topic of the paper) but Laura never clued in and continued pestering him about writing the paper (and willing to pay for it, money being no object). Such actions, if left unpunished, will only devalue college degrees (and they're pretty low as it is). And besides, it's not like colleges never mention “Don't plagiarize” to students—I recall that coming up every class I took.
[1] http://www.livejournal.com/users/theferrett/478344.html
[2] http://www.aweekofkindness.com/blog/archives/2005/03/laura_k_pahl_is.ht
[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/misc/gothic.html