For a few weeks in May, my friend Greg worked as a “scavenger” at Yale, going through all the crap people leave behind in their rooms after finals and (mostly) trashing it. He was paid pretty well, and got to keep anything he found. His final haul, I believe, was a few bags of chips, a blue bicycle and a ratty Dr. Pepper t-shirt he is way too proud of.

That is all very much less impressive than this.

According to police, a West Philadelphia apartment vacated by seven Penn students last month was, upon later inspection, found to contain a human skull.

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A New York Post article entitled “SKEEVY IVY SCAMMER: NYer Faked Way Into Yale and its $$: Probe” (when did NYP start sourcing headline-writing to 13-year-old girls on MySpace?) breaks the identity of Yale’s mysterious scam artist. Gawker breaks a second identity via a web of rumors on our comment boards: Bonesman Victor Cazares is also rumored to be the gay lover who initially alerted authorities to inconsistencies in Maharaj’s story.

Meanwhile, this 2006 Spec article offers a Moebius strip of imagined Maharaj history. Before claiming to be a Columbia transfer at Yale, he apparently claimed to be a Yale transfer at Columbia:

“Columbia has been disappointing in almost every way,” said Akash Maharaj, who transferred to Columbia from Yale at the beginning of the year. By the end of first semester, he was ready to transfer back.

Since his arrival here in September, he says, pretty much everything has been going wrong. He says that the Core Curriculum is “old-fashioned and ridiculous”, the school environment is “anonymous”, and, though he loves New York City, he gets to do things around the city “only around once every two weeks, anyway.”

Ironically, it was Maharaj’s loss of anonymity-in the arms of a lover-that ruined him. Falsified identities can be lonesome that way.

Yale Daily News reports that a 26-year-old student “defrauded Yale University wholesale,” faking records, transcripts, and major elements of his identity. After burning through $46,000 in financial aid, Yale tried to pull a hush job on the guy-whose name isn’t in the articles-with a quick, quiet dismissal, but the alleged fraud sticking to his “not guilty” plea, Yale and the mysterious man will be airing their dirty laundry in court, starting next week.

The story has so many twisting elements, it reads like a daytime soap: Gay lovers’ spat! Race-related unrest! Forgery, identity theft, mental instability! The defendant may have duped NYU, Columbia, and Yale with falsified transcripts and tales of charitable works in Sri Lanka (probably fake) and a childhood in Trinidad and Tobago (probably real). YDN indulges the byzantine plot here.

Equally distressing (read: disgustingly juicy) is the fact that he made it this far. Records suggest at least four years of financially-aided education, and while we understand that transferring credits can be a total bitch, that’s gotta add up to at least one associate’s degree in “Fraudulent Psychopath,” right? YDN explores college-app forgery here, but really, all you need is this sentence:

The revelation that someone could infiltrate Yale shatters the mystique of the Ivy League as an impregnable bastion of the elite.

Raise the alarm! Our ranks have been broken! We’ll follow this story as it unfolds; so far, my frantic Googling offers zilch; I can’t even find stuff on the September charge.

As of 3AM today (don’t ask) a Daily Penn news brief under the title “N.Z. teen pleads guilty to hacking Penn server” was linking to the above garbledy-goo. It was the only link with the problem. Hacker story hacked? Why, it’s so meta, it’s almost quaint!

So, the probably-psychotic Penn guy who tried to break into a classmate’s room while sputtering jibberish on the nature of “reality”? Rodin House residents are now saying the ordeal was even scarier and stranger than the DP reported. A Rodin resident with ties both to victims and attacker writes in,

He injured 3 police officers, smashed the glass of a fire extinguisher case and tried to fight them off with the shards. He [put up a] fight until the end, and they had to strap him to a guerney and carry him out because he wouldn’t leave. He punched 2 officers in the face, had one in a headlock and busted that one’s knee.

The student in question has since made bail, though nobody seems to know where he is or what he is doing. His parents were witnessed moving their son’s personal effects from his dorm yesterday. At press time, the conditions of the attacker’s bail (psychiatric care? restraining order?) and university status (leave of absence? expulsion?) are unknown.

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The Harvard Police Log steps into the ring today for a bout with the reigning champ of dramatic renditions of campus crime, the Dartmouth Police Blotter. We open with a quick one-two punch in the mean aisles of Cambridge’s Au Bon Pain:

February 6
4:43 p.m.-Officers were dispatched to Au Bon Pain to a report of an assault in progress. Officers arrived and spoke to the reporting party who stated that when they attempted to sit down at a table they were threatened by another individual. The reporting party states that the individual then kicked them and struck them in the knee.

February 18
7:01 a.m.-Officers dispatched to Au Bon Pain to a report that an individual reported threw a chair at another individual. Officers arrived and searched the area for the individual with negative results.

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We get that people are, like, desperate to go Harvard. But stealing the identity of a missing (and likely murdered) chick? Cold.

Chicago suburb Tinley Park went totally beserk yesterday when five women were brutally murdered and then, by pure coincidence, an America’s Most Wanted fugitive and Ivy League scamster was apprehended by authorities. Montana high school drop-out (and lover of puppies) Esther Reed enrolled at both Harvard and Columbia under stolen identities, one of which belonged to South Carolinan Brooke Henson, who disappeared eight years ago and is, according to authorities, most likely dead. Reed’s ruse came to light when Henson’s family received news that their missing child was alive and well and a student at Columbia! Wait, no, just a scam artist.

Despite taking the GED and SAT and earning entry to two Ivy League schools based on applications she completed by herself (albeit under Henson’s name), CNN reports that Reed was a little dim in “plausible lie” department:

An ex-boyfriend told CNN that Reed — posing as Henson — often bragged about being a world-class chess player who earned a living playing the game competitively.

The man told CNN that he believed her until he challenged her to a game and beat her.

This is the second large-scale Ivy League identity theft this year.

Two days ago the New York Times reported the arrest of a virulently anti-semitic Brooklynite with a weapons cache “including pipe bombs, crossbows, guns and silencers.” Horrified but removed enough from the event to avoid excessive distress, we remained unaware of the Ivy League connection until we saw New York Daily News‘ coverage. Headline: Bomb-making factory found in apartment of Columbia Professor.

Michael Clatts is an associate professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and specializes in epidemiology — i.e. the spread of infectious disease, a pretty damning field of study for a guy living in a terrorist den. Clatts was out of the building when his roommate, Ivaylo Ivanov — a Bulgarian national who spends his free time walking the dog and packing pipe bombs into Nerf footballs — accidentally shot his fingertip off and sought medical help from the police. Imagine their surprise when they entered his home and found a stockpile of super-terrifying weapons! Clatts’ relationship with Ivanov is not yet clear. Though “Clatts once described himself and Ivanov as roommates, nothing more,” residents also report that “It’s not a huge apartment” and “One has to assume Michael must have seen something at one point.”

Or smelled the burning gunpowder. Or been kinda weirded out by the bulletproof vest and crossbow.

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It looks like all those Ethics classes at Wharton haven’t exactly been rubbing off. In what will likely turn into an Ivy League Bonnie and Clyde courtroom drama/saga, Edward Anderton (Penn ‘05) and Jocelyn Kirsch (Drexel ‘06) stand accused of massive identity theft. After burglarizing their neighbors’ apartments, Anderton and Kirsch established credit cards in their neighbors’ names. They then spent a whole lot of money that wasn’t theirs and basically wreaked havoc until Friday, when they were arrested and charged with about a zillion crimes.

According to the Philadelphia Daily News, “Kirsch’s walk-in closet was bursting with so many designer clothes, shoes and handbags that cops couldn’t step inside.”

The couple weren’t exactly Robin Hoods, either. When one of their stolen checks bounced, well, they turned up the heat.

Someone at the salon tried to contact Kirsch by phone, then with a text message, to which Kirsch allegedly replied: “Hello. You don’t know my name, but I know yours. I also know your nice place on . . . Street and how you get home at night. You’re the one who should be worried.”

After searching their Rittenhouse Square apartment, police found $17,500 in cash, dozens of credit cards and fake drivers’ licenses, and keys to unlock many of their neighbors’ apartments and mailboxes.”

Needless to say, this puts regular collegiate douchebaggery in perspective.

All year we’ve been going on and on about how dangerous Penn’s West Philadelphia neighborhood is. We’re sort of reconsidering that. With panty-stealers, wife-murderers, pederast professors, malicious hackers, and now burglarizing identity thieves, it seems that Penn is the problem, not the neighborhood. Someone really needs to protect West Philly from the criminals at the University of Pennsylvania.

After the jump: the cops speak out, and the detective work begins.

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In case you’ve been living under a rock (say, Princeton NJ or Hanover NH) Penn’s had some crime problems lately.

The latest installment in Penn’s naughty-student soap opera is a worldwide computer hacking scheme, allegedly anchored in the Engineering School’s server and orchestrated by bioengineer Ryan Goldstein ‘09. The FBI indicted Goldstein for computer fraud conspiracy based on a hack that organized 50,000 computers to attack other computers, or maybe to kill people and robots and tiny baby kitties, for all I know. It’s all Matrix to me. Goldstein, who goes by “Digerati” when consorting with his cyber-criminal friends, reached out to the famed hacker AKILL. AKILL leads a “small but elite” ring of hackers known for perpetrating some 1.3 million security breaches worldwide and wreaking digital damages valued at tens of millions of dollars. In real life, AKILL is an eighteen-year-old boy in New Zealand. Not even kidding.

So how did some pimply teenager down under get mixed up with a Penn engineer, take down an Ivy League university’s server, and attract the attention of an FBI sting called “Operation Bot Roast II”? (again, not even kidding) Read on.

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