Indian student deported after confessing on Reddit to faking dad’s death for scholarship
By Ryan General
A 19-year-old Indian student, Aryan Anand, was deported from the U.S. after he confessed on Reddit to a fraudulent scheme to secure a full scholarship at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. In a post titled “I have built my life and career on lies and fraud – Long,” Anand confessed to fabricating academic records and even faking his father’s death to qualify for financial aid.
- Admitting to lies: Anand claimed that high tuition costs of Ivy League colleges led him to resort to fraud. He said he aspired to attend prestigious American universities but admitted that he hadn’t prepared well for his Class 12 board exams, a crucial determinant for university admissions in India. Despite being rejected by most of the universities he applied to, Lehigh accepted him and offered full financial support. “I created a completely fake death certificate of my father, but I did and sent that to my college, saying my dad got cancer and is dead, so my mother would receive his pension and that would be almost half of his actual income, so I won’t be able to pay for these 5k also,” he wrote in the now-deleted post.
- Fraudster unmasked: A Reddit moderator investigated Anand’s claims and successfully unmasked his identity. This led to Anand’s arrest and subsequent guilty plea to forgery on June 12. Although he faced a potential jail sentence of 10 to 20 years, a plea deal resulted in his admission to Lehigh being revoked, his expulsion from the institution and his deportation back to India.
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