A former USC admissions official agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud on Wednesday.
In a plea agreement filed with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Hiu Kit David Chong, an assistant director at the USC Office of Graduate Admission from 2008 to 2016, admitted to obtaining graduate school admissions slots for unqualified international students.
His services included submitting doctored transcripts, fraudulent letters of recommendation and bogus personal statements in applications in exchange for thousands of dollars in cash, according to the plea agreement.
“The university has cooperated with the government’s investigation,” the university wrote in a statement to Annenberg Media. “Chong concealed these actions from the university and continued engaging in them for two-and-a-half years after he left USC. Based on what we know, these actions were isolated to one rogue former employee.”
This case, though not related to, comes a year after the Operation Varsity Blues admissions scandal.
The plea agreement stated that Chong used his now-defunct Monterey Park-based academic consulting company, So Cal International Group Inc., to appeal to unqualified students who were seeking admittance to USC’s graduate programs.
Between February 2015 to December 2018, Chong solicited and received payments from three international students, with payments ranging from approximately $8,000 to $12,000 each, in exchange for admission to USC using fraudulent application materials, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The FBI began investigating the case in 2017, with an undercover agent offering Chong $8,500 in exchange for doctoring transcripts with a 2.1 grade-point average, according to the plea agreement. It also stated that the fictitious student was later admitted to USC with a GPA of 3.47. Chong also offered to pay a surrogate to take standardized tests—such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language and Graduate Record Examinations—for the student.
The defendant’s attorney Stanley L. Friedman told Annenberg Media during a phone interview that Chong was residing in China until recently.
“He hopes that the court will find mitigation in the fact that he is very remorseful for what he did and voluntarily came back from China to handle the charges of the case,” Friedman said.
Chong admitted to helping three unqualified international students gain admission to USC and collecting a total of $38,000, including from the undercover law enforcement official.
Chong will be summoned to appear in the U.S. District Court on a future date. When he enters his guilty plea, the information document detailing the charges states that he will face a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.