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College Admissions Scandal: More Indictments Coming?

Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V.

The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered.

Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing power, databases and algorithms, but by interviewing somebody. According to multiple reports, a suspect in a securities fraud case had heard about the admissions scamming going on and used it to bargain with federal authorities for more lenient treatment.

One interview led to one new suspect, a college coach, who gave the FBI other suspects, which gave them approval by judges to tap phones, and that brings us to up to today.

There will be more accused because all of those arrested coaches will have lawyers, and all of those arrested will be looking for reduce the chance that they will have to spend years in prison.

Do we really believe that Rick Singer’s ring of bribery of college coaches and exam proctors is the only one of its kind in America? If not, who else would know about the other Rick Singers still in business? Perhaps the coaches who have lost their jobs and are facing charges of accepting bribes.

We wrote in Real Due Diligence Can Never be Mass Produced that proper due diligence about a person, especially someone who will receive security clearance to handle sensitive information, requires interviews. “Think about how much information you can find about yourself on the internet: everyone you’ve ever worked with? Dated? Had an argument with? Those things are gathered not by looking at databases, the web and social media exclusively, but by interviewing.”

In Talk Isn’t Cheap Even When Offline we said, “to find out about people, you nearly always have to talk to others about them. Of course, a lot of what you may hear could turn out to be gossip. But being gossip doesn’t always mean something isn’t true. It can also mean that it’s factual information someone doesn’t want you to know about.”

Interview the coaches, find out who the other Rick singers are, and get to the parents offering bribes through them. Charge, arrest, repeat.