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1. Law school professors who taught a student (and occasionally a work supervisor, e.g., law firm partner, if they've worked a while after law school) write these types of letters.
2. The application portals of the universities ask for the nomination (by the student) of anywhere between zero (King's College London) to one (UCL, QMUL, e.g.) to three (Oxford and Cambridge) to up to five (Harvard) referees. The form asks for the official, institution-associated, email ID of the referee(s) (so only an @nls.ac.in kind of ID would be acceptable, not any random ID like gmail). Some universities (e.g., UCL) ask for referee phone numbers as well, for further verification. Yet others (LSE being a prominent example, which asks for a compulsory two references) ask why a particular referee has been nominated, with LSE specifically giving options on their form such as "availability", "institutional policy" etc (i.e., they think that some institutions, for certain reasons, may require certain professor(s) who taught a student something specific or who were in a specific position of responsibility for a student (e.g., academic advisor) to write a reference).
3. Once the student's application is submitted (or in some cases, once the student has inputted the reference details into a form), the referee gets an automated email from the concerned university's system, giving them a secure link to upload a recommendation letter to, and a deadline of when to upload it by. The student doesn't get this link. The universities usually ask also that the reference be written on institutional letterhead. Often, these systems have the option for a popup to show up at the student's end if the referee hasn't submitted within a certain time, for the student to either change the referee they are using, or re-input the referee details, so the request of a reference upload email with the secure link gets resent.
4. The above is done to ensure that (a) the referee isn't a fraud; and (b) the student has no idea what has been written.
How are they submitted?
Do student know from whom recommendation will be sought from? If yes, it will always speak nice things about the students only
TLDR: An Indian kid conned his way with a full scholarship for a BTech in the US, got caught after he posted an anonymous post on Reddit boasting about his fraud and then another Indian guy traced him down on the basis of clues he had left in his post.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/aryan-anand-reddit-confession-led-to-indian-student-s-deportation-from-us-101719663208023.html
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/indians-abroad/story/indian-student-aryan-anand-plea-deal-deportation-lehigh-university-pennsylvania-fake-document-charged-arrested-reddit-post-2577013-2024-08-05#
https://www.reddit.com/r/Btechtards/comments/1dqqq2a/so_this_is_how_aaryan_anand_got_caught_by_lehigh/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Btechtards/comments/1dr57g0/behind_the_scenes_of_aryan_anands_fraud/