Monday, May 24, 2010

Adam Wheeler Catches Harvard With Elaborate Con

Ivy League college administrators no doubt viewed 23-year-old Adam Wheeler as a young go-getter. Grades looked great and his list of activities were top-notch. But as stories go, Mr. Wheeler’s tale was a bedtime fairy tale for our cynical age. The prince charming Adam Wheeler faked his entire educational career, according to ABC News. Wheeler scammed scholarship groups and installment loans for people with bad credit organizations for well over $ 45,000 in order to play the role of a Harvard student. This led authorities to incarcerate him on 20 charges, ranging from identity fraud and larceny, all the way to forgery.

Article Resource: Intercollegiate faker Adam Wheeler scams Ivy League schools By Personal Money Store

Adam Wheeler had the con down in his sleep

Schools like Harvard saw what appeared to be a great asset to their student body, and Wheeler was all too happy to lead them on. Verifying Wheeler’s claims didn’t exactly register. Could it be that Adam Wheeler was that smooth a criminal? Whatever the case, administrators in charge of the Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships actually paid attention and started to uncover work samples Wheeler claimed were his own. The reality is that they were plagiarized, of course. One lie discovered led to another, and then the house of cards began to fall.

‘An elaborate, entangled web of lies’

Middlesex County DA Gerry Leone characterized Adam Wheeler's game in these terms. Adam Wheeler had all the right lies, from exclusive prep school and perfect SATs, all the way to Harvard. To change it up a bit, he’d also applied at Brown ,Yale and other Ivy League schools for transfers (or maybe to escape capture). The reality of his scholastic situation is that he went to public school, did not have perfect SAT scores and had actually been kicked out of Bowdoin College in Maine.

Fellow students can’t figure out how Wheeler got so far

”What are these achievements if they’re not something that you kind of have done yourself?” asked a stunned fellow Harvardite. College can be its own kind of fraud all by itself; the student was probably jealous that Wheeler did them one better. Or simply college is valuable and Wheeler was simply milking it for all it is worth.

Citations

ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/adam-wheeler-accused-faking-harvard-university-scholarships/story?id=10674294



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