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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12608083

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12566502

Basically, don't, whatever you do, be tempted to plagerise material for your thesis!!! Even the great and the good can fall!!! :-)

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A couple more - firstly more topical.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12608869

Gadaffi(duck)'s son apparently may have used used a Ghost Writer!!! (Hope the situation gets sorted out quickly out there by the way.)

Also, the Germans seem to be doing well on the subject of cheating (and poisoning).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/don-tastes-poisonous-revenge-of-phd-cheat-1077478.html

Note the above links are to stories already published and in the public domain (posted more to bring a smile to people's faces). No-one should post up anything unsubstantiated in response (i.e. liable, litigation, etc.), though the odd urban legend should do no harm!!!
;-)

I read somewhere that they were gathering evidence for plagarism in Martin Luther King's thesis at the time he was killed too.

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Early_life_and_education

"King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." A 1980s inquiry concluded portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly but that his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." :$

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The cut-and-paste mentaility certianly makes it temptingly easy to plagerise but academics are fighting back with increasingly complex software that can scan documents for evidence of copied material. You can base your work on somebody else's, as long as you don't copy their sentances, ay least demonstrte that you have put at least some thought into it!

However, therein lies a problem.  If your PhD is one in a sequence in a project lasting many years, you're going to cover a lot of the same source material covered by your predecessors.  In such cases, good parts of your literature review are going to look very similar to those of your predecessors.

There are those in the situation where they can only 'expand and elaborate', bringing in new pieces of literature to enhance what had gone before or to be more critical of previous literature than their predecessors.  Although apparent replication may be unintentional, as the same literature is being trawled over (especially if the field is limited) then how do you avoid similarity?

Plagiarism is actually more widespread than I originally thought. It's not just students that are guilty of doing it. I've actually come across journal articles (particularly reviews) and even a couple of books that have evidence of plagiarism. I suppose that when you do become expert in a topic, know about 'all' the sources, you can spot it.

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You need look no further than this bloke in South Korea as an example of fraud!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk