Authorship abuse in research and academia is a common practice across the world. Whether it be giving undue credit to people who have not amply contributed to the research in the form of ‘gift authorship’ or denying credit where it is due: to research assistants, doctoral candidates under supervisors and ghost writing; the emergence of new technologies and digital tools such as ChatGPT (AI for automated tasks) only further complicates the situation. Since academic positions assess the quantity and quality of publications in selecting potential employees and awarding further promotions measured through elaborate APIs (Academic Performance Indicators), those desirous of excelling in this field are engaged in a sort of race to have more and specially, top tier publications. Thus, bypassing standards of research has borne various fraudulent activities: predatory and clone journals, citation manipulations, duplication authorship and even the complete denial of authorship. A new dimension in this kind of exploitation is that of doctoral candidates and independent researchers based abroad carrying out entire PhD thesis and research projects by exploiting students from the Global South under the garb of research assistantships without providing either acknowledgment of intellectual contribution, authorship status or adequate remuneration. Similarly, internationalisation of the peer review process under the Open Access paradigm has aggravated path dependencies for indigenous scholars. In this paper, I aim to describe the different types of authorship abuse, the emerging technological tools that enable plagiarism in intellectual work and various publishing malpractices that compromise standards of knowledge production with a special focus on ghost-writing. To elucidate how and why these ‘malpractices’ may be becoming more commonplace, I will utilise the testimonies of students who have been part of these jobs by conducting interviews and analysing the advertisements for these hiring arrangements found on social media platforms of LinkedIn, X and Bluesky.