As part of a plea agreement with US officials, a 19-year-old Indian student who was arrested and charged with fabricating documents to get into a US institution will have to return home.

For the 2023–2024 academic year, Aryan Anand applied to Lehigh University, a private research university in Pennsylvania, using fictitious and fraudulent documents. Anand had fabricated admissions and financial aid paperwork, according to a report published in The Brown and White, the student publication at Lehigh University, last month. The revelation was the result of a police investigation. It even claimed that he had faked his father’s death as a part of the scheme to get a scholarship and admission.

On June 12, Anand was charged before Magisterial District Judge Jordan Knisley and was given a $25,000 bail. He entered a guilty plea to a single count of forgery. He received a term of one to three months in Northampton County Prison as part of the plea agreement, which amounted to a time-served sentence, defence attorney Molly Heidorn was cited as saying by lehighvalleylive.com.

Anand must go back to India as per the agreement, and Lehigh decided not to pursue reimbursement for the roughly $85,000 that was lost. After his release, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement took control of him.

According to a release issued by the office of Northampton County’s district attorney Stephen Baratta, Anand had created a fake email address impersonating a school principal, the report in lehighvalleylive.com said. As per the release, Anand’s father is still alive and resides in India.

Anand’s forgery was discovered when his case was investigated in response to a post he made on Reddit with the headline “I have built my life and career on lies.” He had revealed all the specifics of his fraudulent operation in that anonymous post.

According to the Brown and White report, the inquiry got started on April 26 after Lehigh’s Admissions Department received word of the post from a Reddit user. “The criminal complaint revealed the thread was authored by someone with the username ‘u/transportationOK4728,’ and ‘the creator was following only one University group of Reddit and that University was Lehigh University’,” the report said.

Anand was identified as the author of the post—which has since been removed but contained Anand’s plan—after more inquiry by the Lehigh police. He had declared in the report that he made up a fake email address in the format of principal@schoolname.com for his application, submitted a death certificate for his father in order to obtain additional financial aid for hardship, fabricated tax records, changed his transcripts from years one through three of secondary school, and made up a fake Senior School Certificate Examination to demonstrate his academic performance in his last year of secondary school.

According to Anand, the goal is to obtain financial aid and admission to a university in the United States. He was charged on April 30 with breaking the laws against forgery, tampering with documents or identification, theft by deceit and theft of services, according to the criminal complaint filed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The criminal complaint states that “metadata revealed the academic documents were modified using Adobe Photoshop, and the death certificate and tax documents were altered using the “iLovePDF” website.” According to the report, Anand was taken into custody and charged with three felonies, that is theft by deceit, thrift of services and forgery and tampering with records or identification in the second degree.

(with inputs from PTI)