15 Chinese Accused of Using Test-Taking Impostors for College Entrance Exams
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Version 0 of 1. BOSTON — Fifteen Chinese nationals have been accused of cheating the college entrance examination system with a scheme that involved fake passports and test-taking impostors, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday. The 35-count indictment, which was returned on May 21 in the Western District of Pennsylvania, sketches out a complex scheme in which certain individuals are accused of paying impostors using fake Chinese passports to take college entrance exams, mostly at testing sites in the Pittsburgh area, including the SAT and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, in the hope of using them to gain admission to American colleges. David J. Hickton, the United States attorney for the District of Western Pennsylvania, said some of the defendants were admitted to universities around the country, which would have helped them qualify for student visas necessary for entrance into the country. “If they are in fact not supposed to be students of the American college because their admission was fraudulently obtained, then their visa has been fraudulently obtained as well,” Mr. Hickton said in an interview. The people charged paid nearly $6,000 in some cases, the indictment said. The charges include conspiracy, counterfeiting foreign passports, wire fraud and mail fraud. Only 12 of the accused were named. Ten reside in the United States and two in China. Mr. Hickton said he hoped that Chinese officials would cooperate with his office. Suspicions about international students cheating on American university entrance exams have swirled in recent years. Last fall, for example, test scores of thousands of students from China and South Korea were temporarily withheld while test officials looked into suspicions of cheating. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, reviewed the scores and decided not to release some of them to colleges because of concerns about their validity. According to the Institute of International Education, China sends more students to study in the United States than does any other country; 31 percent of the international students in the United States during the 2013-14 academic year came from China. That year, 274,439 Chinese students studied in the United States, an increase of 16.5 percent over the previous year. The indictment says the conspiracy went on for four years, from 2011 to earlier this year. It says the beneficiaries of the scheme used online messaging services to request that an impostor take an exam in their name. The beneficiaries then provided the test takers with a copy of their passport. A false Chinese passport was then produced, bearing the test taker’s face and the beneficiary’s identifying information, which the test takers used to identify themselves and sit for the exam. For example, in February 2012, a passport bearing the name of Siyuan Zhao but showing the face of a different person, who was redacted in the indictment, was mailed to Western Pennsylvania. That March, an unnamed person pretended to be Mr. Zhao and took the Toefl exam and, later that month, Mr. Zhao had the results of that exam forwarded to Northeastern. Mr. Zhao, 24, of Revere, Mass., was arrested on Thursday morning and made an initial appearance in Boston’s Federal District Court. He was remanded to the custody of the federal marshall services and has a detention hearing scheduled for Friday. Stellio Sinnis, the public defender representing Mr. Zhao, declined to comment on the case. The other charged individuals who reside in the United States will be summoned to appear in federal court in Pittsburgh on June 17. The other 11 individuals named in the indictment are Han Tong, Xi Fu, Xiaojin Guo, Yudong Zhang, Yue Zou, Biyuan Li (a.k.a. Jack Li), Jia Song, Ning Wei, Gong Zhang, Songling Peng and Yunlin Sun. College entrance examination officials, including one from the Educational Testing Service, were quick to praise the indictment. Stacy Caldwell, a vice president with the College Board, which creates the SAT, said in a statement that her organization had contributed to the investigation. She said the actions of federal officials involved “are consistent with the College Board’s commitment to identify and stop illegal activity that undermines the integrity of our exams and the hard work of students around the world.” But Bob Schaeffer, the public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, an organization that has long raised questions about the integrity and effectiveness of standardized testing, said the investigation showed how difficult it was to verify identity. “Since this scam worked with passports, it seems plausible that fake U.S. driver’s licenses or other identification cards could also be used for registration,” he said. Mr. Hickton, the prosecutor, said he believed the issue extended beyond the 15 people charged on Thursday. “I would not want anyone to be left with the impression that that’s the sole country involved or the scope of it,” he said. |