Indian Student ‘Aryan Anand’ False Story of Father's Death for US Scholarship Revealed on Reddit

Los Angeles/Aug 05, 2024
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh
Aryan Anand, a 19-year-old Indian student, has been arrested and charged with falsifying documents to gain admission to a US university. He will return to India under a plea deal with American authorities. Anand's scam was discovered after he posted about it on Reddit.
Last month, Lehigh University’s student newspaper, The Brown and White, reported that a police investigation found Anand had falsified both admission and financial aid documents. On June 12, he was arraigned by Magisterial District Judge Jordan Knisley and released on a USD 25,000 bail. Anand pleaded guilty to one count of forgery.
As part of the plea agreement, Anand was sentenced to 1 to 3 months in Northampton County Prison, which amounted to a time-served sentence, according to defense attorney Molly Heidorn, as reported by lehighvalleylive.com.
A release from Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta’s office stated that Anand created a fake email address impersonating a school principal. The report on lehighvalleylive.com confirmed that Anand's father is alive and resides in India.
The investigation began when a Reddit monitor informed Lehigh’s Admissions Department about a post on April 26. The criminal complaint revealed that the post was made by a user with the username ‘u/transportationOK4728,’ who was following only one university group on Reddit—Lehigh University. Further investigation by Lehigh police identified Anand as the author of the post, which has since been deleted. In the post, Anand detailed his fraudulent activities.
Anand admitted to creating a fake email address in the format of principal@schoolname.com for his application, submitting a false death certificate for his father to obtain additional financial aid, falsifying tax documents, altering his secondary school transcripts, and creating a fake 'Senior School Certificate Examination' to demonstrate success in his final year of secondary school. This was all done to secure admission and financial aid to attend a university in the United States.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania filed a criminal complaint on April 30, charging Anand with forgery, tampering with records or identification, theft by deception, and theft of services. He was arrested and charged with a second-degree felony for forgery and tampering with records or identification, as well as a third-degree felony for theft by deception and theft of services.
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