USC Admissions Official Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud Scheme

LOS ANGELES – Hiu Kit David Chong, a former University of Southern California admissions official, has agreed to plead guilty to a wire fraud charge in a scheme to obtain USC graduate school admission slots for unqualified international students in exchange for thousands of dollars in cash.

Chong, a 36-year-old Arcadia resident, admitted that he caused false college transcripts with inflated grades, phony letters of recommendation and fraudulent personal statements to be placed in the students’ admissions packets.

According to his plea agreement, from February 2015 to December 2018, Chong solicited and received payments – ranging from approximately $8,000 to $12,000 – from unqualified international students or from others who were acting on behalf of the unqualified students.

Chong purchased phony college transcripts purporting to be from Chinese universities and instructed his supplier to create transcripts to show falsely inflated grade point averages. Chong admitted he submitted and caused the submission of the phony documents in the international students’ USC application packets, including fraudulent letters of recommendation and fabricated personal statements purportedly written by the applicants.

Chong also offered to research how to arrange for a surrogate test taker to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the results of which USC would consider when making decisions regarding admissions applications, according to court documents. In his plea agreement, Chong admitted that he concealed from the university that the applicants paid him to facilitate their admission.

When Chong enters his guilty plea, he will face a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.

The FBI investigated this case. This matter is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Steven M. Arkow of the Major Frauds Section.

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