“Companies like this have, unfortunately, been around for a long time.”
The first one I ever came across (might have been an advertisement in the old “Boston Phoenix”) appeared in the mid-70’s, a company memorably named “Quality B*llsh*t”.
Of course, with the internet, those operations have become both ubiquitous and amazingly convenient. High school and college faculty have access to programs that can search data bases for plagiarized papers, but as best I can see, about the only way to stop the “best” of those operations (the ones that write each paper as a custom job) is by demanding some in-class writing exercise/s to identify those students who really have little facility with the written word.
From the Villanova Law Review:
Facilitated Plagiarism: The Saga of Term-Paper
Mills and the Failure of Legislation and Litigation
to Control Them
By Darby Dickerson
It cites QBS and others.