More cases of foreign student fraud have come to light at Lehigh University, raising serious questions about the extent to which American schools in general have the capacity to stop criminal foreigners from gaining admission to the United States.
A case involving an Indian national, who had received a full-ride scholarship and was exposed only because he admitted to his extensive fraud on Reddit, was the subject of an earlier CIS report.
Now, fraud perpetrated by five foreign students from Ghana has also been identified, exposing serious flaws in Lehigh University’s vetting process. Their blatant frauds not only gained them access to the United States, but also resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship funds. The five Ghanaian students are currently facing criminal prosecution for forgery and theft.
At issue is the ease with which foreign nationals have been able to deceive the U.S. government and an American university about their identities, submit falsified documents without raising suspicion, and obtain access to the United States and large amounts of financial aid in the process.
A central question is whether this fraud is particular to Lehigh University or whether this same type of fraud exists within many foreign student programs at universities across the United States. The facts of these cases indicate that this recent fraud has been uncovered not because of some serious effort by Lehigh or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop fraud within the foreign student program, but rather because the Indian student publicly admitted to the fraud and because the age of one of the Ghanaians triggered a school official to take a closer look at applications, as discussed below. Most likely, if the Indian student hadn’t proactively admitted to his fraud and if one of Ghanaians was a couple of years younger, all of this fraud would never have been detected.
ICE’s foreign student division, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), recently posted a blog titled, “Tips for DSOs [Designated School Officials]: Verifying International Student Documents”, likely because these fraud cases are garnering media attention. But the blog post is largely meaningless and offers such tips as, “Carefully examine each document for uniqueness and originality.” SEVP offers no standardization or trusted resources for verification. SEVP refers to “the academic journeys of international students”, when it should be reminding schools that it is located in a federal law enforcement agency and will use its full authority to put an end to any lawlessness tolerated by these universities.
Congress demands that this fraud and misrepresentation is prevented through careful monitoring via the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), the most significant post-9/11 database within the federal government. The fact that this fraud is going undetected raises serious national security implications that cannot be allowed to continue.
A Job for HSI: How Pervasive Is the Problem? To begin to get this problem under control, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which oversees the foreign student division SEVP, needs to launch a comprehensive and deep investigation into academic records and do the work that academia is not. It may be that a very high percentage of foreign students at Lehigh University are engaged in similar fraud, or it may be that only these four Ghanaian students and the one Indian student are engaged in such conduct. It may also be that this fraud is specific to Lehigh for some reason, or it may be that this fraud is happening at universities across the nation.
HSI needs to launch a comprehensive investigation of Lehigh’s admissions processes and spot check other universities to see if the same problems exist elsewhere.
HSI has made no public statement about any investigations it is running, nor has it verified the scope of the problem. My guess is that the amount of fraud is significant and that it exists at so many universities HSI doesn’t yet have the ability to quantify the fraud in any way that would allow for a narrowly targeted operation. HSI is also likely concluding that the policies and standards that have been developed under SEVP are so lax that these problems cannot be solved by law enforcement alone, but must include a serious overhaul of SEVP regulations and policies. But until HSI can provide SEVP some sense of the scope of the problem, SEVP is unlikely to change its policies anytime soon.
In the case of the Ghanaian students, Lehigh decided to take a second look at the application of Jude Dabuo, who was set to start school this fall, because he is 25 years old and someone in the admissions office thought it was “uncommon” for a person of that age to be an incoming freshman. According to the affidavit, the admissions office “discovered concerning format, markings, and spelling errors on Jude Dabuo's transcript, leading them to question its validity”.
While reviewing Jude’s paperwork, the Lehigh admissions office noticed that he mentioned that his younger brother, Henry, was already a student at the university. Lehigh decided to look at Henry’s paperwork and found the exact same problematic formats, markings, and spelling errors in his transcript. The brothers’ transcripts came from different foreign high schools and different years of attendance, which raises even more questions about the pervasiveness of this fraud and how easy it is to commit fraud against American universities.
The fraud continued to open up even further because Henry mentioned in his application that he knew another Lehigh student, Otis Opoku, which led to the admissions office looking into his documents as well. According to the affidavit, the admissions office “found the exact same markings, format, and spelling errors as on Henry and Jude Dabuo's transcripts”. Opoku attended the same foreign high school as Henry Dabuo.
In addition to mentioning his younger brother already at Lehigh, Jude Dabuo also mentioned in his application two other Lehigh University students, Cyrilstan Nomobon Sowah-Nai and Evans Oppong, which prompted the university to review their paperwork.
In each instance, Leigh reached out to the State Department to receive assistance in contacting the high schools in Ghana that these students attended in order to obtain the original transcripts and grades. It turned out that the real transcripts were materially different from what these students submitted to Lehigh in their original applications years prior. Opoku is a junior at Lehigh, Sowah-Nai is a sophomore, and Oppong and Henry Dabuo both just completed their freshman year.
According to the criminal complaints, the four Ghanaian students were awarded over $590,000 in financial aid. Specifically, Opoku received a financial aid package worth $212,933, Sowah-Nai received $127,213, Henry Dabuo $129,244, and Oppong $120,970.
HSI should be able to determine whether this is an issue specific to Lehigh, in which case SEVP should consider rescinding the school’s certification to enroll foreign students, or whether this is occurring at schools throughout the country, in which case HSI needs to get SEVP to strengthen its policies immediately.
Why Don’t Schools Know Whether Foreign Transcripts Are Legitimate? One of the most worrisome aspects of the national security processes involving foreign students is that DHS relies heavily on school officials for vetting foreign nationals arriving to our shores. In order to receive certification from SEVP to enroll foreign students, each school must have a Designated School Official (DSO) who is expected to continually update the SEVIS records of their foreign students so that DHS can monitor this population, as Congress intended. For example, a DSO must update SEVIS if the student drops out, graduates, or is convicted of a crime. Yet these DSOs receive limited training on how to review documents for accuracy.
In fact, the SEVP External Training Application (SETA), which is supposed to provide some guidance on SEVP programs, was sunset and became “inaccessible to users on Sept. 25, 2023”. The ICE broadcast message notes that “SEVP will continue to provide updates on the relaunch of SETA”, but as of October 2024, there have been no updates and no relaunch. A call placed to SEVP revealed that there is no estimate for when this training will be restored. Any update to this training, if it’s to be effective, should include extensive overviews on how to verify foreign documents, but there’s no evidence that SEVP is planning any such addition to the training.
There are currently 1,503,649 foreign students and 7,417 schools certified to enroll foreign students, and DHS obviously doesn’t have the capacity to manage each student individually, so relies on DSOs to keep tabs on them. This is an obvious weak spot in the SEVIS national security mission. One fix would be for DHS to reduce the number of schools it certifies, and increase the training and standards, in order to reduce the likelihood of national security threats. A smaller population of foreign students would allow law enforcement in DHS to provide better oversight.
Schools have a financial incentive to admit large numbers of foreign students and aren’t looking for reasons to deny entry.
The extent to which schools understand they are critical players in the national security space is an open question. As some DSOs have told me, there are good DSOs who take their jobs seriously, and there are lazy DSOs who don’t know how to properly vet applications and paperwork. On top of this, schools have a financial incentive to admit large numbers of foreign students and aren’t looking for reasons to deny entry. Recently, a number of DSOs trying to do the right thing regarding compliance issues were pushed out of their jobs at Harrisburg University, for example. At Columbia, a DSO filed a lawsuit after she alleged she was fired for trying to stop fraud.
Other than the risk of being decertified to enroll foreign students, schools and their DSOs are not too concerned about cutting corners. DSOs who try to do the right thing and question the validity of transcripts and other documents received from foreign students often find themselves in a tough position; on the one hand, their employer — the university — demands that the DSO not act too tough and find any means to approve foreign students, and on the other hand, SEVP — the government — does not provide DSOs enough brightline rules on when to deny applications. When having to decide between making their employer happy (and keeping their jobs), or trying to satisfy government officials who don’t provide clarity how a DSO should act on an application, a DSO is, naturally, often going to side with the school. This arrangement undoubtedly allows for significant amounts of fraud to go undetected.
There are no detailed government standards related to document verification that U.S. schools are expected to abide by when admitting foreign students. ICE’s foreign student division provides some guidance on how student information is to be submitted to the student database, SEVIS, but does not get involved in the admissions process. The State Department is also not in the business of questioning a school’s decision to admit a foreign student. The Department of Education provides minimal resources for verifying foreign student transcripts and related documents, and nothing requires U.S. schools to make use of these resources.
The result, as evidenced by the recent Lehigh cases, is that U.S. schools don’t really know whether foreign schools are legitimate, don’t know whether the e-mails they receive from foreign schools are actually from the schools, and don’t really have a way to verify the test scores and transcripts submitted by foreign students. As in the case with the Ghanaians, school officials at Lehigh had to reach out to the State Department for assistance contacting the foreign schools in order to obtain the real documents. Why didn’t this happen at the outset of the admissions process? One would think that for as long as the United States has had a foreign student program, and as large of a population as it is, these processes would be well-developed by this point. But that’s certainly not the case. This is a very significant threat to America’s national security and someone in government needs to take initiative and get this under control immediately.
One possible start would be requiring universities to become familiar with information offered by an organization called World Education Services and the International Association of Universities, which provide guidance on how to obtain authentic international academic credentials. SEVP might also require certain best practices for schools wishing to be certified to enroll foreign students, like conducting a certain number of audits each year (e.g., Cornell tells foreign students that it “conducts audits to verify the authenticity of final transcripts for a random sampling of entering students”.) There’s no reason SEVP couldn’t standardize this process. But SEVP would also have to determine whether these resources are sufficient, and decide whether certain countries are unable to provide the type of information needed for verifying the paperwork of their nationals seeking to study in the United States.
Lehigh’s Lack of a Verification Process. As the recent fraud cases at Lehigh make clear, the university doesn’t have an adequate process for verifying the admissions documents of foreign students.
If Jude Dabuo were a few years younger, it’s likely his application wouldn’t have been more closely reviewed, and the apparent fraud of these Ghanaian students would have remained undetected. Or, if he and the rest of the suspects hadn’t mentioned each other on their applications, Lehigh probably wouldn’t have looked into any of them. There appears to be no systematic process for detecting fraud like this at Lehigh, and that’s probably the case at most American universities.
At this point, there’s every reason for Lehigh to take a second look at the paperwork for all Ghanaian students on their campus — for starters. They should work with HSI to do just that in order to figure out how widespread the fraud is among Ghanaian students. But concurrent to that work, Lehigh should do a deep dive on foreign students from other countries as well. The results will potentially be embarrassing for Lehigh, so HSI should take the lead and run the investigation. Until HSI runs this type of an analysis and figures out the scope of the problem, it’s going to be difficult to fix the problem.
According to the school newspaper, an admissions staffer told the court during a preliminary hearing that “schools generally use their institutional domains for email communications, and since the email address provided on the transcripts was a Gmail address, he expressed concerns about verifying the authenticity of the transcripts”.
This concern — foreign schools using Gmail accounts for communicating with U.S. schools — was also an issue in the fraud case between Lehigh and Indian student Aryan Anand. In that case, the fraudster student felt that his school’s use of Gmail would appear fraudulent to Lehigh so he created an e-mail account with a handle that looked official and matched the name of his school. In other words, use of unverifiable Gmail accounts appears to be common across foreign schools throughout the world, yet American universities seem willing to accept them as legitimate without any serious effort at verification. And furthermore, even if an e-mail address looks official, U.S. universities still don’t have a systematic way of verifying them.
An investigation of Lehigh’s verification processes would undoubtedly reveal that the problem is systemic to the university, and that the problem exists in nearly all other U.S. schools that admit foreign students.
It’s important to remember that in the case of the Indian foreign student Anand, and the cases of the Ghanaian students, the fraud became apparent not as a result of a proactive investigation by Lehigh or any government agency. Anand admitted to his fraud on Reddit, and a moderator of that social media website reported it to Lehigh; if Anand had kept his mouth shut, his long-term fraud would have likely continued undetected. Had the one Ghanaian student been a few years younger, and/or had they not mentioned each other on their entrance essays, the fraud in all of their cases would also be undetected and ongoing.
An HSI investigation of Lehigh University’s verification processes would undoubtedly reveal that the problem is systemic to the university, and that the problem exists in nearly all other U.S. schools that admit foreign students. HSI will need to direct their foreign student office, SEVP, to develop appropriate standards immediately. In order to protect the nation and get this issue under control, HSI will likely also have to direct SEVP to stop certifying so many schools to enroll foreign students. As the appropriate processes are developed, SEVP might be in a position to certify more schools in the future. But as it stands, the validity of our nation’s foreign student program is entirely up for debate.
Overstay Rates a Serious Problem. Foreign students from Ghana are engaged in lawbreaking at a high rate, with over 18 percent of them overstaying their F, M, or J visas. The State Department has failed to protect the United States from their document fraud, but failed again in detecting their likelihood of overstaying the visas.
Note to the State Department: Hundreds of Ghanaian nationals seeking these visas are planning on overstaying, so you might want to step up your interview process and start denying some of these applications. And the overstay rate of other nationalities is much worse. Why is the State Department failing to protect the United States from mass illegal immigration, and what is the plan to stop the pervasive lawlessness that the State Department has tolerated for years? If you can’t get this under control, the Department of Homeland Security is probably going to have to take matters into its own hands.
Note to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations: The State Department has allowed in tens of thousands of foreign students who are here in violation of the law. You need to get the State Department to tighten up their practices so that you don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time locating and arresting these individuals. In the meantime, you’ve got thousands of people on F, M, and J visas that you need to go out and arrest — this category of foreign nationals is under your jurisdiction and SEVIS is under your watch because you have the necessary investigative skills. Continuing to ignore this mass illegal immigration is a direct threat to national security and neither the State Department nor your foreign student division is going to be blamed; it is HSI that has the arrest authority.
The GoFundMe Campaign. Despite their seemingly obvious fraud, the Ghanaian students at Lehigh are being supported by other students at the school who have set up a GoFundMe account on their behalf. The backgrounds of these students according to the donation site are copied below. Notably, one of the students used his fraudulent entry to obtain a paying internship at Microsoft. One wonders whether he submitted phony information to Microsoft as well. How does Microsoft feel about the fact that it employed a foreign national who apparently lied his way into the United States with phony documents? Is Microsoft concerned that its own systems have now been compromised? Has Microsoft reached out to HSI to demand that better standards are implemented so that Microsoft doesn’t have to worry about becoming a victim of fraud? Has HSI reached out to Microsoft to apprise them of any investigative work?
Three of these students have been working while at Lehigh, and there are certain limitations to employment for foreign students. HSI should determine whether any violations occurred regarding their employment.
The GoFundMe page includes this passage: “There are a lot of opinions circling around the boys, but let us remind you that the fact is these boys are intelligent. They were accepted into Lehigh for their minds, their accolades, and their passion to learn.”
While it’s true that they are crafty enough to apparently commit mass fraud against the United States, it doesn’t appear they were accepted for their minds since they falsified their transcripts. Here are their bios, according to the GoFundMe page:
Otis Opoku: Otis, a junior majoring in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science, had just returned from a successful Microsoft internship and secured a return offer for next summer. He has been using most of his Microsoft paychecks to support his siblings' education in Ghana and provide for his father, who works at a roadside kiosk. Otis was also paying for Evans to stay in a room this summer because Evans was homeless.
Evans Oppong: Evans had just finished his freshman year at Lehigh in the College of Engineering. Unable to find an internship or summer job, he was homeless over the summer. Otis was covering the cost of his accommodation, and Evans spent many nights in a room with no electricity. He has been on the Dean’s List every semester and dedicates himself to his studies at the expense of his social life.
Cyrilstan Sowah-Nah: Cyril is well-known at Lehigh as a dancer for the African Renaissance dance team and has performed at various school events. Despite being only in his second year, he was awarded One Love Africa King at a school event and worked as a Mountaintop Research Intern for the College of Health over the summer.
Henry Dabuo: Henry also worked as a Mountaintop Research Intern this summer. He is a dancer and performer for African Renaissance. Having completed only his freshman year, he often sends money back to his family and friends in Ghana. Henry is known for his joyful spirit and bringing laughter to those around him.
Bottom Line. HSI needs to launch a comprehensive investigation of Lehigh University’s admissions processes and spot check other universities to see if the same problems exist elsewhere. HSI should determine if this type of fraud is more common for certain countries of origin or whether it exists throughout the entire foreign student program.
HSI and SEVP should be warning all universities that if they don’t immediately clean up the fraud that exists within their foreign student population, ICE will remove the school’s ability to enroll any foreign students. HSI and SEVP should also immediately implement standards that schools are expected to meet when it comes to verifying application data from foreign students.