This action research attempts to explore the perceptions of Turkish university students on plagiarism while evaluating the effectiveness of an online application used to deter plagiarism. The participants were 40 first year university students studying in two different sections of an academic writing class. The findings show that the participants acknowledge the existence of purposive plagiarism while the application shows that anti-plagiarism applications can help reduce university students' level of plagiarism. [An earlier version of this paper was presented at Israel's First International Conference on Academic Writing, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2010.]