WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Fifteen Chinese nationals have been charged with developing a fraud scheme in which they paid imposters to take entrance exams, including the SAT, and gained acceptance to elite American colleges and universities, the U.S. Department of Justice said yesterday.
Conspirators were paid up to $600 each time they used counterfeit Chinese passports to trick test administrators into thinking they were the person who would benefit from the test score, a federal grand jury charged.
Between 2011 and 2015, mainly in western Pennsylvania, the defendants paid imposters to take the SAT – previously known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test – the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), under false names, according to the Justice Department statement.
