Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman Among Parents Caught In $25 Million College Admissions Scandal

an audience of about 50 people, including parents, exam administrators, coaches, and more have been charged in a wild $25 million college admission scandal that allegedly involved bribery, falsifying documents, and then some funny Photoshop expertise, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling reported while in a press conference, NBC affiliate WKYC reports.


Here's what happened, according to the New York Times: a male named William Rick Singer founded a college prep organization called the Edge College & Career Network, or The Key, basically meant to do what your average college prep corporation does — at least on paper. But Singer allegedly used his agency as a front to help students cheat on their SATs and ACTs by reportedly bribing test proctors and/or increase college admittance through sports teams by bribing Division 1 coaches.


According to Lelling, Singer has agreed to plead guilty to the bills and is cooperating with federal prosecutors on the case.


As one would expect with any efficient corporation model, the payment level varied depending on the kind of bribery desired. As an example, according to reports, the actress Felicity Huffman asked Singer's firm to alter her daughter's SAT scores; for $15,000, she allegedly secured her daughter a spot in a controlled test room, where the proctor corrected her daughter's bubble sheet right following the exam. Her score increased by a total of 400 points between the opening time she took the test (uncorrected) and the second (corrected), according to The Hollywood Reporter.


That's a lot of cash and certainly cheating — yet it's definitely a lot cheaper than the $500,000 Lori Loughlin and her spouse, Mossimo Giannulli (of Target's Mossimo Distribute Co. Fame), reportedly paid to have their two daughters recruited to the USC crew team and so guaranteeing their admission into the school. Neither of their daughters actually participated in the sport.


A deeper dive into the scandal at large revealed the truly bonkers techniques used for falsifying sports recruiting, which involved pulling sports rankings out of thin air, fully making up level of involvement in a sport (or some days involvement at all), and Photoshopping an image of the student's face onto the body of a person playing the sport. (It's not clear if all of those techniques were used with regards to Laughlin and Giannulli's daughters.)


The length of the investigation is massive, making use of 200 FBI agents across the nation to charge the 50 people in six states — making it the hugest college admissions prosecution the Justice Department has ever seen, Lelling pointed out.


Schools affected by the scheme include Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, Wake Forest, USC, and more, nevertheless at this time, "the schools are not imagined co-conspirators," Lelling said. Lelling also deemed the parents the "prime movers of this fraud" and noted that "it remains to be seen if we charge any students" — which really just sounds like all of this is just the beginning.