Who was involved?

There are 50 people charged in the case, including actors Felicity Huffman, known for her role on the TV show Desperate Housewives and the feature film Transamerica, and Lori Loughlin, a cast member on the TV series Full House. Defendants in the case include parents and college athletics coaches.

What are they accused of?

The wealthy parents were part of the biggest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, prosecutors say, accused of conspiring to get their kids into elite colleges through bribery and cheating. The FBI investigation was dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues”.

How did the scheme allegedly work?

Administrators of the SAT and ACT college exams were bribed to allow someone else to pretend to be the student and take the exam in their place, according to a criminal complaint. In other cases, the proctors gave the students answers or fixed their wrong answers after they had taken the test.

The children sometimes faked learning disabilities so that they would be able to take the tests at facilities where staff had been paid off, the complaint says; parents paid between $15,000 and $75,000 a test to participate in the cheating scheme, which was allegedly masterminded by William Singer, who ran a college prep company called The Key.

In another part of the scheme, college coaches allegedly received bribes to designate applicants as recruited athletes – which gives them a leg-up in admissions – regardless of their athletic ability, and sometimes when they didn’t even play the sport they were supposedly recruited for. Clients paid Singer a total of $25m to bribe coaches and university administrators, prosecutors say.

A student’s handwriting sample for a test taker to mimic from a criminal complaint. Photograph: US attorney's office in Boston

When did it all start?

The admissions scam has been going on since 2011, authorities say.

What colleges were involved?

The schools include Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Texas.

What role did a sham charity play?

Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation as a tax-exempt charity, charging documents say. Payments from parents for their kids to participate in the cheating scheme were made as donations to the purported charity, and the foundation was used to pay bribes to SAT and ACT test administrators.

What charges do the defendants face?

Charges include mail and wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering.

What did Singer promise his wealthy clients?

“What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school,” he told a client in one wiretapped conversation in 2018. “They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don’t want to be messing around with this thing.”

In another wiretapped conversation, a mother discussed with Singer plans to have someone else take the ACT on her son’s behalf. “I know this is craziness, I know it is. And then I need you to get him into USC, and then I need you to cure cancer and [make peace] in the Middle East,” the mother said. The boy, who was apparently unaware of the scheme, received a score of 35 out of a possible 36 on the faked ACT.

How did students get into elite schools as recruited athletes?

In one case detailed in court documents, a parent paid Singer $1.2m to get a student into Yale in 2017. The women’s soccer coach at Yale allegedly received a $400,000 bribe from Singer to designate the girl as a recruited athlete – even though she did not play competitive soccer, and the coach knew it. The student got in.

Singer created fake athletic profiles for the students, the complaint says, sometimes staging photos of them playing the sport or allegedly doctoring pictures put applicants’ faces on the bodies of athletes.

Cooper Field at Georgetown University, one of the universities named in the case, in Washington DC. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

How were Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin allegedly involved?

Huffman paid $15,000 to cheat on her oldest daughter’s SATs, the complaint says. In October 2017, when Huffman’s daughter was approved for extra time on the SAT, she wrote in an email: “Hurray! She got it.” When a counselor at her daughter’s high school said she would proctor the exam herself, Huffman wrote: “Ruh Ro! Looks like [my daughter’s high school] wants to provide own proctor.”

They managed to get the test moved to West Hollywood Test Center, a site Singer said he controlled, where a proctor would help students cheat. Huffman’s daughter got a score of 1420 on the SAT, about 400 points higher than what she got on the preliminary version of the test, authorities said.

Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, agreed to a pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they were not rowers, the complaint says.