Rachel Yould was the kind of sparkling student parents everywhere use as a model of achievement. She's a former Miss Anchorage who graduated from Stanford with a 4.0 GPA. She went on to study at Oxford and win Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships...
Even Rachel's husband Brett was surprised by the amount of money his wife had scammed through the student loan program
Her education would eventually lead her to Japan, where she was studying for her doctorate. But that's where she also discovered she'd maxed out the $60,000 lifetime cap on her student loans under Alaska's program.
At the same time, she began telling friends that she was a victim of sexual abuse. She claimed her father was a sexual sadist who'd raped, mutilated her genitals, harassed and stalked her since she was young. So she applied for a federal program that allowed her to change her name and get a new Social Security number for her own safety.
But she'd never reported her father's attacks prior to this moment. In fact, there was no record of her father's abuse at all until Social Security officials told her she would need some sort of justification for getting a new number. That's when she decided to file a restraining order against him, though she was in Japan and he was now living in Georgia.
Complete with a new number and identity, Yould began plying the world of easy government money. From 2003 to 2006, she took out 19 student loans worth $680,000. Many were based on fraud. She told lenders she was a medical student and forged letters of support from various academics. She also used her original name to co-sign for documents, even though she wasn't in school for some of the time she was getting those loans.
After she was caught, sexual abuse advocates flocked to her side, claiming prosecutors were victimizing the victim. Yould claimed to have visited doctors around the country to treat the savagery she'd endured at the hands of her father. But she refused to provide records from those doctors to support her claims.
Her father, meanwhile, has never been charged with abuse. And there's never been any evidence that it actually occurred.
Despite pleading guilty to 15 counts of mail and wire fraud, in addition to making false statements, she still blamed the feds for not properly explaining how to use her new Social Security number.
But a judge clearly wasn't buying that a Rhodes scholar didn't know it was wrong to forge loan documents. Yould was sentenced to nearly five years in prison and ordered to pay $700,000 in restitution.