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Purpose. The aim of the study was to determine how familiar the students of the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek are with the concept of plagiarism, the extent to which they use Internet sources inappropriately, and how many of them got caught for this form of cheating. Approach/methodology/design. The research was conducted through an online survey. For this purpose, a structured questionnaire that consisted of several sections was used. In accordance with the aim, four hypotheses were tested and discussed. The descriptive statistics was applied in the analysis of the basic features of the collected data, while the inferential statistics included the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and a onetailed proportion test. Findings. The conclusions were drawn from the responses of 504 university students. The results of the study have shown that students generally feel that they are well acquainted with the concept of plagiarism and that they know how to correctly cite internet sources. Furthermore, the study found that the students are mostly familiar with the basic rules of referencing internet sources, but not with all of them. The analysis revealed that students plagiarised in their papers, such as mid-term and final papers, essays, reviews, project assignments, etc. The results have shown that about 80% of students had engaged in some form of plagiarism at least once. Out of all the respondents, 40,1% admitted to having copied someone else's entire paper from the Internet; 46,2% to having copied large parts of someone else's paper; 62,1% to having copied some parts of someone else's paper; and 78,4% to having paraphrased without acknowledging the source. Of those who had done so only slightly more than 5% were caught plagiarising. Limitations. The survey included students from only one university. However, since Croatian students have much in common, it can be assumed that the findings of this research can be largely generalised to a wider population. This has been confirmed by the studies conducted at other Croatian universities, too. Practical implications. The study contributes to a better understanding of the phenomenon of student plagiarism in the context of Croatian higher education and provides some guidelines for the prevention of such unethical behaviour. Originality/value. The paper deals with the aspects of plagiarism that have not yet been sufficiently explored among the population of Croatian students. Consequently, the paper provides new insights into plagiarism in the digital age related to the knowledge and behaviours of university students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]