<p>(CNN) -- A high school dropout who stole the identity of a missing South Carolina woman and used it to gain admission to two Ivy League colleges has been arrested, police said Sunday....</p>
<p>A fugitive for more than a year, Esther Reed was arrested Saturday by U.S. Marshals in suburban Chicago, said Clark Brazier, a spokesman for the police department in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina....</p>
<p>Reed assumed the identity of Brooke Henson, who was 20 years old when she disappeared more than eight years ago from Travelers Rest, investigators say.</p>
<p>It's unclear how Reed obtained Henson's personal information, but Reed used Henson's identity to take the SAT and GED, and then applied to the schools, said Jon Campbell, a Travelers Rest Police Department investigator who spoke to CNN last year.</p>
<p>Eiewww. Reminds me of the terrible situation of Tonica Jenkins, the woman who faked her way into Yale's Graduate school, faked a kidnapping, eluded officials while on bond for a huge cocaine deal, and even drugged and kidnapped a street addict for the purpose of murdering her and having the body be assumed as Tonica's.</p>
<p>I'm not condoling stealing identity and deceiving people, but this girl has some ingenuity, street-smart, and book-smart. Too bad, under more favorable circumstances, she could have been a successful businesswoman.</p>
<p>There was a person named "Andreas Alrea" who enrolled at Yale in 1976--turned out to be a completely false identity. He claimed to have made a fortune selling used construction machinery up the Amazon. He was only found out because he enrolled in a demanding Directed Studies program and stopped going to class.</p>
<p>I'm baffled by this...don't they think they are going to get caught at some point? You would think they'd get tripped up somewhere in the application process....letters of rec, transcripts, all of the official data that would be impossible to recreate.</p>
<p>Apparently it wasn't impossible. I agree with reddune, clearly this girl is smart, under better circumstances she could have been a real asset to society.</p>
<p>"Andreas Alrea" created fake school documents, and opened a post office box as the "school" address. It was never revealed what he did about his SAT scores.</p>
<p>As smart and creative as she is if she had just applied under her real name and told her real story, she may have gotten in even if she was a h.s. drop-out. I imagine that her real story is very compelling.</p>
<p>Probably got financial aid of some kind or stole cash somehow. I mean, if this person could fake their way into an Ivy, what would stop them from stealing cash? Seems like an easy task for them.</p>
<p>Actually, Andreas Alrea turned himself into the Dean of Timothy Dwight College (one of the Yale’s twelve residential colleges) near the end of his first semester at Yale. Alrea did so after several of his classmates came to him asking if what they had heard was true, that he had faked his way through the admissions process. Apparently, Alrea had shared his true identity with his girlfriend, also a Timothy Dwight resident. She had shared the secret with her roommate and her roommate had spilled the beans to some of her friends. Alrea realized that he would be unable to continue his charade and departed Yale after the winter break. Surprisingly, he was neither expelled nor prosecuted for his actions.</p>