Moral dilemma in unwittingly being paid to complete a student's work

Question

I am a computer science freelancer who takes on medium-sized projects I can complete in a month or less. I was approached by someone who wanted a set of 12 tutorials at least 500 words each about certain programming topics with code examples and workouts. We talked payment and I accepted this project and got to work. I have been using GitHub to write the pieces and publish them privately on my account.

Here's where things get tricky. After I had completed the tutorials, but before I sent them to him, he disclosed to me his full name and the institution that he attends. It turns out that this was his honors project for an undergraduate major in Computer Science. He has already paid me.

My dilemma is this: I would like to return his money and not send him the tutorials and have him fail his school project. However, I have worked on this for 3 weeks, and I obviously need the money.

In our original conversation, he made no such mentions of secrecy, so at the very least I could make the GitHub repository public and still accept his payment.

My question is this: What is my best course of action? I don't want him to submit that work as his own. However, I still would like to get paid as he did not confine to me he was planning on plagiarism until the very end.

Answer 1

I think you should take the money, try to retain as much of my copyrights as possible (the law may help you do this implicitly rather than explicitly, which may be helpful), and refrain from doing anything else until after the student misuses your work.

Why? Consider that:

• Plagiarism is not a crime.
• Copyright violation is a crime.
• Neither has occurred yet.
• You have done the work in good faith.
• You are not responsible for preventing others from plagiarizing your work.

Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to you because you have already done the work. You have every right to keep the money for the work you have done.

Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to him too, since he has every right to obtain the work from you that he has paid you for and waited for. Even if you refund his money, you can't refund the time that he has spent waiting for you to do the work, so you would arguably be liable for damages too.

If your work is actually plagiarized, then you will have a basis for complaining academically and/or legally, and it will be more difficult for your client to view you as a "snitch", etc. if he violates your copyright.

If you let his institution know before the deed occurs, then I'd argue you're doing something morally wrong: you're getting him into trouble for an act that he has not even committed yet. (This might be fine for dangerous actions, but this isn't one.)

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Clarification:

I should clarify that my answer is only intended for a "generic" freelancer, not someone who has something else at stake too. For example, if you yourself were e.g. a professor/graduate student/public figure/etc., then you could earn yourself a bad reputation among your colleagues by giving him the work even if most other people would consider what you do to be entirely ethical/moral/righteous. In that case, the wisest career move for you may not be the same thing as what a typical freelancer might or should do, so keep in mind I'm not addressing such situations.

Answer 2

I think this is one of the more interesting ethical questions I've ever seen on this site. The answer is really not clear to me!

I think this depends upon the ethical principles on which your business is based. Why are you freelancing medium sized CS projects for pay? Because you need or want the money? To improve your skills? To build your reputation as a programmer? To help the world? These are all reasonable answers, but the amount of weight you give them should inform your response.

Here's where things get tricky. After I had completed the tutorials, but before I sent them to him, he disclosed to me his full name and the institution that he attends. It turns out that this was his honors project for an undergraduate major in Computer Science. He has already paid me.

First of all, I think there's a lesson here about doing business for pseudonymous clients. Many mainstream businesses require identifying personal information from their clients. Some don't, but one presumes they are founded on different ethical principles than the ones that do. If you have any qualms at all about how your product will be used, you should exercise some due diligence in finding out who your clients are and how your work would be used. In this case: what did you think the work would be used for? Did you ask? I think that matters: if your client actively was dishonest or misleading with you, then he is behaving unethically even in his transaction with you. However, if you never asked then -- given that you actually care -- it seems that you have made a mistake.

My dilemma is this: I would like to return his money and not send him the tutorials and have him fail his school project. However, I have worked on this for 3 weeks, and I obviously need the money.

Maybe you need the money, but it's not obvious. Just because you've worked on something for three weeks doesn't make it ethically justified to take the paycheck. Clearly one can imagine conditions under which upon learning the purpose of the work, the only ethical action would be to not provide the product and take the loss of pay. On the other hand, if you would suffer sufficiently dire consequences from not receiving the money -- e.g. being evicted from your home or being unable to provide food and clothing to yourself or your dependents -- then in this case taking the money becomes the lesser evil.

I would like to say that you are only ethically justified in taking the money and turning the student in if (i) you need the money for serious reasons as above and (ii) the student was deceptive in his dealings with you, as above. Absent these two conditions, it looks to me like you are not dealing in good faith with someone who is paying you. The fact that the product is allowing a student to gain a degree dishonestly is definitely an ethical concern (to me, in particular) but it is not clear that it outweighs the other ethical concerns so as to allow you to "turn the tables" on the student after payment.

One should also point out that the ethical obligation not to commit academic dishonesty lies with the student; although it hurts me a bit to say so, I don't think that the rest of the world is ethically obligated to refrain from helping students cheat. I admire you for wanting to refrain from doing this, but I think that if you are really serious about this then you should seriously entertain not accepting the payment.

Added: Some others have suggested that the OP has an ethical obligation to complete the business transaction with his client. @Mehrdad says in a commment:

Food for thought: if you refused to give the code and refunded him but he sued you for damages (because of, say, a broken contract + lost time/opportunities), do you think you would win the case? I don't know about you, but if I were the judge, I would likely rule against you.

I am not a businessman, lawyer or judge but I find the prospect of a lawsuit extremely far-fetched, and even the underlying principle seems suspect. A business contract is, in my understanding, an agreement to receive payment for certain services rendered. In all of my experience, a willingness to forego the payment releases the business from the obligation to perform the services: in other words, the contract is probably not being broken. (In the TV show Catch a contractor -- a reality show that enacts sting operations for shady contractors -- when the contractor is "caught" they are presented with three options: completing the work, giving the money back, or being sued. They never give the money back.) In terms of suing for lost time and opportunities: the business has lost the time and opportunities as well. In this case the business would be refusing service for a clear ethical reason so public exposure would make the OP look much worse than the business...in my opinion, of course.

Further Added: I seem to have missed the part where the OP said he has already been paid. In that case I agree that it is likely that according to the contract, the OP has a legal obligation to provide the services. He could still feel personally that his ethical obligation to not be part of academic dishonesty is higher than his legal obligation...in which case he should be prepared to weather some loss on the legal/business side. I am not counseling him to do so, of course.

Another option is for the OP to confront his client and say that he believes his services have been contracted for academically dishonest reasons. Perhaps he is wrong about that and his client can set him straight. If not, then he and the client may well agree that the best thing is to dissolve the contract and stop the mutually known instance of academic dishonesty from taking place. From a purely ethical standpoint, this seems like a better outcome than taking the money and wondering whether to turn the tables on the client.

Answer 3

You should deliver the work you have accepted to do and were paid for. Doing otherwise (even if you refund your client) is unprofessional and damages your reputation. For example if you two got connected via a freelancing platform, you will probably get a bad review scaring your future clients, and rightfully so.

You may choose to contact the institution your client attends, warning them about the situation before the actual plagiarism happens. I don't see anything legally wrong with doing so (IANAL), it's up to you to decide if you want to report the student before they actually misuse your work.

Of course, you can (and should!) retaliate after the fact: if the said institution publishes the works of their students, and you discover parts of your own work in it, it is your right to send them a notice stating the attribution violation. The institution will, in turn, take actions against the student.

Answer 4

I think the exact terms of your licence agreement with the client will be important here. Do you retain ownership and copyright on the code, and simply provide a licence to the client to use it, or do you transfer ownership of the code outright?

If the latter, then there's not much you can do (and you probably should stop doing this, seriously).

If the former, then the terms of the licence agreement should stipulate what attribution is required and whether or not the source code can be subsequently distributed without your permission. It's one thing to provide code as a service, which your clients are free to use in their projects, but your clients should probably not have the right to re-distribute your (commercial) code without your consent. I hope you have a licence agreement that makes this clear.

If you do have a licence agreement that makes this clear, then this is an open-and-shut case. If the code is for a thesis then the compiled executable will absolutely not be sufficient. The code must be published and this is where you have leverage. Either you have not granted them the right to re-publish that code (in which case you can make a legitimate protest after a violation has occured), or you have granted the right to re-publish the code but with stipulations (ie: inclusion of the licence, attribution, etc). In either of these cases, this checkmates your student as it would either immediately give away the fact that they outsourced their entire project (by inclusion of attribution and licence) or would initiate a legal complaint that would reveal the same.

Given that the student has now notified you of his intentions you can preemptively reiterate the terms of your licence (again, assuming you have one) to make clear that any republication of the code must be in compliance with said terms. This should not affect whether or not you have a right to be paid for the work because, presumably, the student agreed to these terms when you negotiated the job (you did do this, right?).

If you didn't negotiate clear licencing terms and you don't have a formal licence agreement then you're at the mercy of whatever defaults the law provides where you live. IANAL, so good luck with that.

Answer 5

Here is what I would do: separate your concerns.

First, accept payment and deliver the work you did, because that's what you promised to do (and may indeed be your legal obligation, depending on what kind of process or agreement you had).

Secondly, forget your professional connection to this case and consider what you would do if you discovered by some other means that a stranger had outsourced work for their school project. Most people, I suspect, would decide to stay out of it, because they'd rather not have the conflict, or because they think it's beyond their duty. That's a choice that they are welcome to make, but I think the right thing to do is to inform their educational institution of the facts. They are overwhelmingly better-placed than you to decide what the appropriate response is, both in the sense of whether or not the student's behaviour was appropriate (maybe it was totally fine, maybe what you produced was actually not the focus of their assessment), and the broader context of that student's education, record, and what the school's policies and procedures are that this student has presumably already agreed to.

You are not (should not be) telling the institution to punish or otherwise cause problems for this student, and they would probably ignore your opinion on the matter if you did, so it doesn't seem like you need to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. You're only breaching a secrecy that, actually, no-one asked you to keep, and for a very small amount of effort and risk (you can ask the institution not to identify you, if you're worried about that) you can make a substantial contribution to ensuring that the fairness and accuracy of our educational assessment system is maintained.

In other words, judging what should happen to this student when they do what they did is a job you are neither qualified nor expected to do, nor is it one you need to take on. Just enable the people who do have that job to do it properly.

Answer 6

I'm afraid you should probably give him the work he paid for.

However, there are several points to take into account.

Your country will matter a bit. As the original author, you have the moral rights on the work, and other people cannot claim it as their own work. These will hold in many countries, and may not even be waived (eg. in most european countries), so no matter the licensing terms they can't claim your work as their own. OTOH the situation in US is quite different, and your contract could have given away such rights (though I doubt they cared to include such clause).

Even then, you should remind the client that he has to keep the copyright notices in the work you gave him (unless your contract authorizes him to remove them). A nice remind is appropriate so if they proceed in an infringing path, and you take action your position was clearly established in that you didn't expect them to be misattributed.

Next, I would ensure that the tutorials have clear copyright notices. This kind of work is great for that, as in addition of the explicit ones, there's ample room for hidden ones: your name could be read in acrostic on some paragraph, an example code could output when run "One of anonymous_display great tutorials", etc. Those would be very clear indicators of authorship should you had to prove if it was really your work or not.

Additionally, I would take digital evidence of possessing the code at the given point. For instance, you can hash the zip of what you are handling, and have a public timestamp server sign that. This way, a public CA is vouching that such zip (containing your © notices) existed at time X (so you couldn't have added them later after retrieving the PhD of your client).

You mention the possibility of publishing the work itself in Github. That would also help (I would still take the previous steps), and has the added benefit that you are making your work searchable without you having to be involved pointing out at this guy (it could have been found by any professor reviewing the honors project). Albeit publishing on your own the work you were hired to do might not be allowed (explicitly or implicitly).

I have to mention the excellent point by loneboat that his use of your work may be legitimate, even though you have to prepare for the case it's not.

Answer 7

There is legal precedent for the comparable service of professionally writing essays for students, so-called essay mills. At the very least, one seems to tread muddy waters; some cases quoted mention states tend to hold the service provider responsible. The California law, say, apparently can hold the seller responsible if they "know or should have known" that their work will be used by the student as you say - and now know - it will.

You never intended for this to happen, and your question here speaks well about you. You are not a professional "github mill," just find yourself in a bad situation. It is very unlikely that you'd be prosecuted for this; it would probably go unnoticed. However, considering the legal context mentioned above and discussed more in the link, if you can return the money, I'd do it. Your client is likely going to protest, but what are they going to do: take you to court as you refused to write their thesis as soon as you were informed of their plan? As this would make their intent certainly public to their institution, I don't see that happening.

As others have said, do make sure to add related disclaimers to your work in the future.

Answer 8

I'm really sorry you got conned into unwittingly helping someone cheat. I feel it would be unfair to offer you specific advice about whether you should or shouldn't take the money from my comfortable position of not having to suffer the financial (or moral) consequences of each decision. But your question brings to mind some general insights from economics that would perhaps be helpful to you.

Specifically, two concepts that come to mind are the sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion. If we compare your situation to a different situation in which a hypothetical dishonest student approaches you today and offers to pay you the exact same amount of money as you are owed by the real-life student, and all you have to do is to complete a short programming homework assignment he was given so that he can submit it as his own (let's say it will take you 30 minutes), it seems very likely to me that you would refuse to participate in such cheating: it would be much easier for you to forgo a profit you haven't earned yet than it is to accept a loss of a sum of money you have been imagining for some time you will be receiving and have become emotionally invested in. Such is the nature of loss aversion.

Nonetheless, behaving differently towards sunk costs than future costs (or forgoing a hypothetical future profit) is called a fallacy because it is considered by economists as irrational behavior. The point is that a rational decision-maker should (in theory at least) behave consistently when faced with two decisions that involve the same payoff, the same amount of future investment of work (as in my example, where the 30-minute time investment in the homework assignment doesn't really make a material difference), and the same moral consequences, and not take into account irrelevant information about things that happened in the past. So perhaps one approach to thinking how to proceed would be to imagine a parallel situation like I described in which you need to make a fresh decision about becoming complicit in someone's cheating, and thinking how you would react to that. This is assuming that you agree that loss aversion is indeed irrational, which I think is only one way of looking at it. After all, we are all human beings, and no one can blame you for being upset at the possible loss of a considerable amount of money you thought you had earned through honest work.

Answer 9

This one is easy. You did work for money. You keep the money.

As Robert Columbia so wisely pointed out it is the same situation as if a deli sold a ham sandwich to an observant Jew. (Assume the deli did not misrepresent the ham sandwich as something else.)

The deli is not responsible for the violations of Jewish kosher rules.

Answer 10

Consider the possibility that the work that you did, while being good craftsmanship (I hope), may not be considered a scientific work, and may be used and properly attributed by the student.

The normal way of quoting someone is to find a publication that supports your work, and citing it. If it just happens that you need something to support your work but nobody has ever written it, if you are a professor you might encourage a student to write a paper about it and then cite it. If you are a student with enough cash you could hire someone to write that paper or do that work, pay them, and then cite them correctly.

If he takes your paid for work and claims that he wrote it, sure, that is plagiarism, and you should tell the relevant people.

Answer 11

Since you posted your dilemma in Academia section, most will tell you to act to punish the student. In academia, the student must have violated a set of serious rules that normally should be followed up by a punishment.

You are a software developer though and you must abide first of all by your contract, agreement with the client and your intermediary (freelancer website), and the general law. Unless your work has some sort of a license that requires the end user to acknowledge the original author (like MIT license), then the student may not be breaking the law here.

If you feel mistreated you can send an e-mail to his institution reporting his breach of academic ethics. You will feel better but face a risk that the student will contact the freelancer intermediary and try very hard to spoil your reputation there to get back at you.

My advice would be just to make sure you explicitly discuss copyrights with your future clients.

Answer 12

The advice is to take the money. And let me explain why. If not you, he will find another contractor to write a work for him for sure - don't even doubt it! You will be unable to prevent an IT industry from one more asshole-with-money entering it. He will fail later and for sure, and be tainted by it's fail on a practice. It's not a question, it's just a question of time. You did your job, a good result must be paid well - respect yourself and honor your skill : you are definitely not the person who should suffer from the fact that someone is a money-minded dick, who thinks that can just buy everything

Answer 13

To everyone who's suggested OP should abide by the contract despite what the products might be used for: Shame on you. Are you so devout in your fetish of commercial contractual relations as to put them before fundamental moral considerations? I would pontificate more, but that wouldn't answer OP's question.

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Now an answer for OP:

Issue 1: You bear some responsibility - you should have known better

This contract was strange from the get-go. Usually when someone is contracted to prepare educational material it is by an institution, not by an individual. It is also unusual, if I am not mistaken, to contract a freelance SW developer rather than someone with a teaching background. Finally, you said you were "approached" by that person, i.e. you physically met. Did he strike you as a person who would need this strange kind of service?

Also, when you were discussing the work - you must have asked about the context of the tutorials' use; the target audience; what they are assumed to know; their typical experience; the goals for audience members after the tutorials are through, etc. If he answered these questions, you had probably figured out what this was going to be used for - enough to realize this was funny business; if he refused answer these questions, that's even more suspicious. Or, I mean, ok, he could tell you: "This is work I need done no questions asked." - but then you cannot be surprised there are moral, ethical or perhaps legal issues with this work you're doing.

So, at any rate, you knew there was something amiss with this transaction. I'm not saying that means you're not entitled for compensation for your work, but it's not like he sprang something on you completely out of the blue.

Now, be honest with us: Isn't it the case that you're feeling guilty about going along with what you were contracted to do, and are, shall we say, semi-consciously forgetful in presenting the less-than-pleasent details? I suspect the answer to be yes. If you want moral or ethical advice, the first piece of advice is be fair in how you tell yourself, and us, the story. That very often leads you to conclusions you may not like, but you already know are right.

Issue 2: An honors project - or perhaps misuse of honors' students by the university?

It is quite strange that preparing 12 tutorials on a subject would be a honors program project for anyone. These are tasks for (tenured or untenured, regular or temporary) members of the academic faculty. I believe one of the following holds:

1. You've misunderstood or misheard what he's told you. This is not so unlikely, since I'm sure he was uncomfortable discussing his transgressions and may not have related them coherently and accurately.
2. The tutorials are not the honors project, but perhaps part of what happens to honors students is that they are given a one-off teaching position on a subject of their choice.
3. (and this is what I'm the most worried about) The university may be manipulating honors students into preparing teaching materials for it instead of actually paying junior/senior academic staff to do it.

I've encountered many cases of option 3 in my experience as a graduate teacher/researcher union organizer. We considered this part of a process of "Juniorification" (rough translation from Hebrew): Adjuncts are used to do tenured faculty work; PhD candidates to do young faculty's / post-docs' / adjunct teachers' work; M.Sc. candidates to do PhD candidates' work; and senior undergrad students used as teaching assistants for peanuts.

If this is the case, I'm not sure it's your problem to have to deal with, but perhaps it would be useful to try to contact the university's academic staff union(s) and discuss the situation anonymously (if they're active and don't have their heads stuck up their asses, which is not impossible considering what I suspect may be going on.)

Issue 3: This is a social/group dilemma, not just a personal dilemma

This situation is not just about you, or you and that student. It's about:

• His university
• His fellow students, who may be adversely affected by underhanded activity (by him or by the university, or both, see above)
• His parents/family, who may well be footing the bill for this project
• Teachers or other members of faculty who may be affected (see above)
• His fellow non-honors students, who might be held to standards of competence/capability which this person is unfairly inflating

Don't try to deal with it just by yourself, or yourself-and-him. Even before acting (disclosing what he did, taking the money etc.) try to get in contact with several of these parties. The parents option might be particularly useful if he is indeed young and living with them.

Now, it's true that there is increased risk of him avoiding payment if you do that, or the deal getting otherwise canceled, but the more you do that the better your chance would be to receive compensation without having to resort to legal means. Also, this would reduce the chance of him trying to get money back from you.

... don't return money for the work you've done, but take no more

You did do work. And you should have been able to do more work and get paid for it, and must now look for another job. On the other hand, you have some responsibility for the way things ended up. So, without making an exact judgement, I would say that what you got so far is probably fair...

But do keep an open mind about how much you should get additionally, or return from what you've received, when talking to third parties.

I really hope this works out - for you and for him and for everyone else involved and am sorry you got into this mess!

Answer 14

Nonetheless I do not like people with diploma who have no knowledge behind it, I would say that you have to do everything that you obliged to provide without trying to screw someone up.

You can't tell a person: "now after one month of work I decided that I do not need your money", because if he would know this beforehand he would have chosen someone else, or may be have done it himself.

Giving him work and contacting university is even worse. It is like backstabbing him, or inserting a backdoor in his program.

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How would you feel if some plumber started to fix your water system couple of weeks ago, then noticed that you have a hamster in a cage and has his own moral dilemma. He is one of this ultra PETA people and believe that hamsters should be free, so he decided to break everything he fixed for you, leaving you without water for a couple of weeks (gracefully returning you the money).

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Some things to consider

• university honor code is not a crime
• you can't out of a sudden add additional copyrights that makes all the work unusable
• you have to negotiate your contract beforehand and stick to it. Otherwise you will be a freelancer who has a whim and screws up people based on his moral judgements (a lot of people has different and strange moral judgements, so it is impossible to predict the next one).

Answer 15

A moral dilemma indeed! I do believe there is a solution.

1. Give the code and they give you the money, according to your contract.
2. Warn the university of your dubious business partner.

It is their own fault that they paid you for nothing. They choose to act immorally. There are four variations of the above:

1. Tell the university the person's name and the fact that he planned on plagiarizing. It then entirely up to the university what they do.
   • Some have voiced concerns over the fact that he hasn't plagiarized yet. Well, tell the university that. It is up to them whether plotting to plagiarize warrants sanctions against the student.
2. Tell the university that one of their students may use their code, but don't tell them who. Now the outcome is fully determined by the student's decision.
   • To give the student a fair chance, comment on how fairly he dealt with you, and that his honesty is refreshing. This will cause internal conflict within him, as he considers his own values. If he chooses incorrectly, he will have caused his own fall.
3. Tell the university. CC the offender.
   • This option puts everything to light. Light is the best moral disinfectant.
4. Tell the university (but not who). BCC the offender.
   • This option forces the offender to make the right choice. He will be angry, but you can note that the money is sunk cost, and you have in fact saved him from moral decay. You may even ask for more money for this additional service, but expect to get stiffed on this fee.

Also, in the options where you don't tell the university who did it, make sure to prepare a moral defense as to why you are withholding that information.

Answer 16

[Edit: I seem to have misread the question, and thought you had already been paid prior to starting work (since you said "discussed payment" and "accepted the job"). Hence my original response. I've edited under the assumption that the asker has not been paid yet.]

In my opinion, you should:

1. Withhold the work from the student, telling him in detail why you do so:

   a. It is morally wrong for him to submit your work as his own.

   b. You did not know about it earlier otherwise you would not have done the work.

   c. You have no obligation to him since he purposely had not revealed his intentions.

   d. He wanted to pay money for a dirty job, and you cannot give him your work without becoming complicit.

2. Still ask for a token sum that you feel you deserve in light of the whole situation, based on:

   a. The amount of time and effort and other costs you spent on the work done.

   b. The amount you feel like returning to him since you do not give him the work after all.

   c. How much you feel it was your mistake that you did not find out earlier.

3. Not tell him your exact reasons for how much money you decide to ask for, but just tell him that:

   a. He has wasted your time and effort because he knows what he is doing is wrong (almost every student has to sign some kind of agreement to uphold academic honesty).

   b. If he wants proof that you actually did the work, you will upload your work to GitHub publicly and inform his school that you were recently made aware that someone might pass it off as their own, without revealing the identity since the potential cheating offense has not yet been committed.

4. If he refuses to pay you, then you have no choice but to accept the outcome.

The reason for all this is simple. If we do not know that what we are doing is wrong or intended by others to be used for immoral purposes, then at that point we are not guilty of the wrongdoing itself, and this does not change when in the future we can look back on the situation with hindsight or with a different viewpoint. However, we are still responsible for doing our best to make sure that whatever we do is not misused for wrong purposes, to a reasonable extent. If we give enough thought to how our work is being used, we can at the end of the day say honestly that we did our best and had sufficient reason to believe that it was for good. This explains why one has to take into account his own responsibility in not perceiving the possibility of cheating, when expecting payment.

I do not agree with some other people that it is alright to give him the work and get paid but secretly inform his school of the potential cheating offense (even if you do not reveal his identity), because by doing so you will be not be giving the student any impetus to change his mind about cheating. If that is your goal, namely to get the student into trouble, then indeed it would serve that purpose well. However, I do not think it is the goal of anyone who wants to make this world a better place. (Doesn't it sound like biting the hand that feeds you?)

Answer 17

Α supplier contracts with a customer to produce some goods. The agreement is to get paid before delivery, and this happens. Then the police appears and tells the supplier that the specific customer is prohibited by law to get these goods (they' re bad for the customer's health). Something that the customer has not disclosed to the supplier. Then rightfully, ethically and educationally, the supplier keeps the money and the goods, and the buyer hopefully learns a lesson. Or not. The customer got himself into this predicament, purposefully withholding vital information, and since he is not a child or mentally incapacitated, he should bear any concequences, intended or not, of his course of action.

The fact that in your case the customer himself acted as the police, does not change anything.

Answer 18

You have a contract, I think you need to fulfill it. You're not at fault, but you're possibly breaking the contract to do this in time, if you do not give him the results, even when you're refusing the pay. Possibly a lawyer could even make something up that you need to pay for loss (more likely in other cases than this one), because the person could have hired somebody else if they knew you would step back in the last minute.

The other point is his fraud against the university. This is not okay and I think it would be fair to inform the university (assuming you have no NDA with the student). To be fair to the student, you may offer him not to inform the university, if he does not use the work as his own, but this is hard to verify.

And you should make sure, that anything you do about this cannot be interpreted as blackmailing. Do not say "pay me or I will tell them immediately", but say "pay me, because you hired me, even when you probably cannot use it because I will inform the university, or I will sue you to get my money".

Answer 19

Always consider: he is the one signing the declaration to his university that he did not get help, not you.

• Take the money
• Give him the code
• Obviously: Stop working for him
• Inform his institution that you strongly suspect that a student used your services to plagiarize, paraphrase what you delivered (e.g. 12 tutorials), ask them how to proceed.