Nearly 50 people were implicated in a nationwide college admissions scam on Tuesday, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.
At a morning press conference, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling explained how the scheme worked. The Department of Justice also released charging documents with further details.
Lelling said wealthy parents paid college admissions consultant William Singer large sums to help their children get into elite universities like Georgetown, Yale, and Stanford, by helping them cheat on the ACT or SAT and/or bribing a coach to recruit them as an athlete.
Singer is a cooperating witness in the probe and is pleading guilty.
Lelling said Singer would pay someone, typically Mark Riddell, to either take the exam for students, or change their answers afterward to get a sufficiently high score.
According to an affidavit unsealed on Tuesday, parents were first instructed to take their child to a therapist and get a letter allowing them extra time to take the SAT or ACT based on a learning disability or some other issue.
Once that documentation was secured, investigators said Singer then told parents to make up a reason why their child would need to take the exam at either the Houston Test Center in Texas or the West Hollywood Test Center in California. Singer had an exam administrator at each of these locations who was paid to overlook the stand-ins taking the exams for students or changing their answers, according to the documents.
Singer paid test administrators Niki Williams and Igor Dvorskiy as much as $10,000 per student, according to the documents.
Lelling said Singer got the funds to pay out these bribes by having his parent clients "donate" between $15,000 and $75,000 per student to a sham charitable organization he started, the Key Worldwide Foundation.
The charging documents say Singer told parents to say the money was to help disadvantaged children if anyone ever asked.
Prosecutors said Singer would bribe coaches at certain elite schools to recruit a client's child as an athlete, despite their sports abilities.
Lelling gave the example of the head women's soccer coach at Yale, who prosecutors said gave one of Singer's students a spot on her team in exchange for $400,000. That student's family then paid Singer $1.2 million for the service, according to the documents.
Lelling said Singer would work with parents to "fabricate impressive athletic profiles" to give credence to their recruitment, with made-up details about their participation in elite club teams and various athletic honors. These profiles even included posed photos of the children engaged in certain sports, or in other cases, Singer's group would use stock images of athletes and sometimes edit the student's face onto the body, according to the documents.
"This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the stead application of wealth combined with fraud," Lelling said on Tuesday. "There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, and I'll add that there will be no separate criminal justice system either."
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