The story immediately went into the stratosphere. No one could resist the specter of the rich and famous engaging in lurid criminality to give their kids even more of an advantage. All the major news outlets led with the scandal. Twitter, the hub of the media elite, had a ball, alternating between mockery and fury. A tidal wave of scorn washed over the whole of American discourse. Ask Tom Brady, Lance Armstrong, or Goldman Sachs: The only thing people dislike more than cheaters winning is winners cheating.

Read: 9 Revealing Moments From the College-Admissions Indictment

Resenting the dynastically wealthy is practically a national sport, and for the most part, that’s what the admissions scandal has been understood to be about: the perfidy of the 1 percent. Many drew parallels to entirely legal ways the rich can rig college admissions, like pledging donations or enrolling in private prep schools. Implicit in the public contempt is the belief that none of this has anything to do with regular middle-class folk. In fact, some of the angriest responses came from people who attended the very colleges that had been part of the scam. For many, the scandal felt like a sign of the times, showing the divide between the rich, cheating their way to the top, and everyone else, who had climbed up the hard way.

Maybe that’s why an odd twist in Tuesday’s scandal stood out: Many of the students who benefited did not know about the fraud being committed for them. In several instances, their parents endeavored to keep the payoffs and cheating secret, arranging false tests so the children would never know that their scores had been deceitfully obtained. The kids were fakes, and ignorant of that fact.

It’s hard to blame people for mocking these oblivious teenagers, who thought they were walking on their own, but were in fact being carried. But it’s also worth considering how events would have appeared from their perspective. A high ACT score would have seemed like just another stroke of good fortune in a life full of it. The same goes for their acceptance into a selective college. In one tragicomic passage in the indictment, the scheme’s orchestrator describes how his student “clients” would sometimes come to him, surprised by their own high test scores, and suggest that maybe they’d do even better if they took the test again. They mistook the secret forces working on their behalf for their own natural talent. If you can’t see the hidden hand behind your success, what other explanations are there besides luck and ability?

In other words, from the students’ viewpoint, this is about as archetypal an instance of privilege as could be imagined. Advantage, after all, is rarely noticed by the advantaged. People don’t have an easy way to compare their lives with those of others, to see how the same situations might turn out differently if they themselves came from a different background. The first instinct is often to attribute disproportionate success to above-average aptitude, but most successful people know aptitude can’t explain everything that’s gone their way. That’s why, in many cases, privilege looks and feels like an accumulation of good luck, a series of little victories that make everything work okay in the end. In reality, luck and aptitude don’t tell the full story. Instead, wealth or caste or social standing work to load the dice in favor of the fortunate.