Predatory Journals and AI-Assisted Plagiarism of Scientific Research: Bootlegging Research as a New Criminological Reality

In 2025, the first known case of what appears to be an article generated by artificial intelligence that plagiarized a CJCCJ article was reported to the journal and its publisher. Such fraudulent bootlegging practices challenge the legitimacy of scientific research and the peer-review process, while raising a number of critical issues with the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). This article presents an overview of this new phenomenon of AI-assisted plagiarism, a set of concerning issues that the scientific community is currently struggling with. While LLMs are unlikely to go away any time soon, currently available tools to detect AI-assisted plagiarism of legitimate research are not adequate and mechanisms to prevent it are non-existent. In that content, we speculate that this case could be a first of many more to come that will impact not only criminology but also other academic disciplines.