The author of a 2014 book called “Getting In,” Singer said in a 2017 podcast that he used to work for a college and had learned insider tips that even high school guidance counselors didn’t know. He said he worked with 8,300 seniors that year, “walking into everyone’s home” and “taking over the process.” He offered a premium, personalized service at $7,000 a year and a tech-based option for $250 to $2,000, he said, and had “hundreds and hundreds” of employees.
In 2010, he pitched a television network on a reality show about college admissions, describing wealthy families torn apart by “out-of-control” parents pushing their kids into elite colleges and learning that even donating millions of dollars doesn’t guarantee admission.
“This is a game. Just realize this is a game,” he said in an audition tape obtained by TMZ.
At the center of the scheme was Edge College & Career Network LLC, Singer’s Newport Beach, California, consultancy. An alleged accomplice, Florida resident Mark Riddell, would take the ACT or SAT college admissions test in place of clients’ children. The parents paid Singer $15,000 to $75,000 a test, structuring the payments as donations to a charity called Key Worldwide Foundation that was affiliated with Edge, according to prosecutors. The test scores were sent to Boston College and Boston University, among others.
“The kid still had to write their own essay, in their own handwriting,” a thin, graying Singer said in court. “That was the only legitimate part of the test they did.”
Students took their exams at specific testing centers where Singer had used the bogus charitable donations to bribe the proctors -- after the kids faked learning disabilities, at their parents’ instruction, to end up at those centers, authorities said.
Singer won over skeptical parents by telling them he had used the same setup many times before, according to court documents.
“They’re all families like yours,” he told Gordon Caplan of Greenwich, Connecticut, co-chairman, on leave, of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York, according to the papers.
In many cases, they referred other parents to Singer. In one instance cited in the documents, he was introduced to the family of a Yale applicant through a Los Angeles financial adviser. An employee of the adviser emailed Singer to say the father wanted to make a “donation” for his daughter’s “application.”
The scheme didn’t rest only on a stratospheric entrance-exam score. At Singer’s urging, parents spent lavishly on bribes for coaches at schools like Yale, Stanford, USC, UCLA, the University of Texas and Wake Forest, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit. A former Georgetown tennis coach, Gordon Ernst, got $2.7 million, according to prosecutors. Singer even helped construct phony athletic profiles for his applicants.