FBI - Celebs charged with fraud in buying their children’s admission to top colleges
What a lame bunch of assholes. Just buy your kids way in? I too wanted my kid to go to the best of the best, or hell, just get accepted. But again. via cash? I hope they get some time.
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Celebs charged with fraud in buying their children’s admission to top colleges
Federal authorities on Tuesday charged 46 people, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and college coaches and administrators, in an alleged scheme to win admission to prestigious universities for the children of wealthy parents.
At a press conference Tuesday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling called the scheme the “largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.” Yale, Stanford and Georgetown universities were among the schools identified as having been duped into accepting unqualified applicants.
Lelling said the operation, allegedly run out of a Newport Beach, Calif., college-admissions coaching company, had several parts, including coaching applicants to cheat on SAT and ACT admissions tests and bribing athletic coaches to identify applicants as potential recruits who could be admitted under athletic waivers requiring lower academic standards.
Among those charged in what law-enforcement officials called Operation Varsity Blues are 33 parents, the owner of the California firm, SAT and ACT test administrators, an exam proctor, a college administrator and college coaches. The FBI said that many of the students — some of whom have already graduated — were kept in the dark by their parents and didn’t know about the scheme. No students were indicted.
William Singer, who ran the California company, called Key Worldwide Foundation, was charged with racketeering, money laundering, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Singer, according to Lelling, laundered money he received from parents under the guise of charitable donations. He is one of two charged as co-conspirators who Lelling said he expected to enter guilty pleas Tuesday.
“Between 2011 and 2018, wealthy parents paid Singer about $25 million in total to guarantee their children’s admission to elite schools such as Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, USC, University of Texas, UCLA and Wake Forest,” said Lelling, adding, “We're not talking about donating a building so that a school's more likely to take your son or daughter. We're talking about deception and fraud."
“These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege,” added Lelling. “They include, for example, CEOs of private and public companies, successful securities and real estate investors, two well-known actresses, a famous fashion designer and a co-chair of a global law firm.”
For Singer’s services, the majority of parents paid between $250,000 and $400,000 per student, payments Singer in part used to bribe college officials, Division I coaches and college exam administrators.
He counseled parents to get letters from therapists requesting their children receive more time to take admissions exams. He paid confederates to register for online high school classes in the students’ names, to improve their grade-point averages. And he worked with parents to create fake athletic profiles for their children, including staging photographs and Photoshopping students’ faces onto stock images, to fill slots allotted by schools for student athletes.
Lelling implicated the head women’s soccer coach at Yale who “in exchange for $400,000 accepted an applicant as a recruit for the Yale women’s team despite knowing the applicant did not even play competitive soccer.”
Others charged include a senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California (USC), Wake Forest’s women’s volleyball coach, tennis coaches from Georgetown and Texas, Stanford’s sailing coach and the coaches of USC’s men’s and women’s soccer and water polo teams. According to the indictment, they were allegedly bribed "to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits — regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport, they were purportedly recruited to play."
Huffman, the Oscar-nominated actress, allegedly paid, together with her husband, $15,000 disguised as a charitable donation for her daughter to take the SAT at a "controlled" testing center where a special proctor would correct answers without the daughter's knowledge. Huffman's husband is the actor William H. Macy, who was not named or charged in the indictment.
Rest - https://www.yahoo.com/news/celebs-ch...180302288.html
Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman charged in college bribery scam investigation
Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are in some hot water after being charged in a college bribery investigation.
According to ABC11 Tuesday, “among 50 people” are involved in the nationwide investigation.
Loughlin allegedly paid bribes in the range of $500,000 to get her daughters into the University of Southern California, and Huffman allegedly made “made a purported charitable contribution of $15,000 … to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter.” It’s not clear what school Huffman was allegedly gunning for her daughter to be accepted into.
ABC11 reported the following Tuesday on how the scam allegedly worked:
Rest - https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/12/l...-bribery-scam/The alleged scam centered around a man in California who ran a business helping students get into the college of their choice.
Authorities say parents would pay him a predetermined amount, with full knowledge of what they were doing. He would then steer the money to one of two places: either an SAT or ACT administrator, or a college athletic coach.
The coaches would allegedly arrange a fake profile that listed the prospective student as an athlete, and exam administrators would either hire proctors to take the test or correct the answers of a student.
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Originally Posted by pete311
