But Soultanali and Kassam brazenly misrepresented the nature and quality of the tutoring services their companies actually provided, both in their marketing materials and in their state provider applications. The two promised to create customized tutoring programs to address students’ academic needs, pre-test and post-test students to determine where students needed help and how effective the tutoring was in providing that help, and create useful student progress reports for parents and schools.

Instead, what schools—and their students—got were mostly generic tutoring programs configured at or below students’ grade levels, partial or missing pre-test and post-test assessments that did little to help students, and fraudulent progress reports that, in some cases, were automatically generated by a computer program.

As part of the fraud scheme, Soultanali and Kassam also engaged in fraudulent billing, including creating invoices based on false attendance records and spreadsheets that contained inflated tutoring time summaries.

But the two didn’t undertake this scheme by themselves. They also bribed school officials and others to ensure that the fraud remained hidden. Bribes included a Caribbean cruise for an assistant principal in Texas and a trip to a gentlemen’s club for a state education official in New Mexico.

All told, the two companies received about $33 million from school districts around the U.S. Investigative activity revealed that Soultanali and Kassam fraudulently obtained at least $11 million of that for themselves during the 2009-2010 school year, using it to buy lavish properties, luxury vehicles, and expensive jewelry.