<p>From today's Wall Street Journal : Wow, this is really clever. A Riff on the idea in "The Producers" that 1,000% of nothing (a play that flops) is nothing. Here we have a college that doesn't exist rejecting all applicants and pocketing their application fees !!!!</p>
<p>WALL STREET JOURNAL
U.S. NEWS
FEBRUARY 26, 2011
College Cries Foul Over a Copycat
By KEVIN HELLIKER</p>
<p>Plagiarism by students is a concern at colleges across the country. But at Reed College in Oregon the problem has reached another level: the copying of an entire school.</p>
<p>The website of a fictitious school called the University of Redwood features a faculty directory and photographs of a campusmost of which in fact belong to Reed. Now, officials are struggling to stop the fraud.</p>
<p>"Our lawyers are seeking to shut the faux Redwood site down," said Kevin Myers, a spokesman for Reed College, which is in Portland.</p>
<p>View Full Image</p>
<p>Officials suspect the University of Redwood website is part of a scam.
Officials at Reed suspect the site is part of a scheme to collect application fees from prospective students in Hong Kong and Asia. After collecting a fee, "a shrewd scammer could wait several weeks, then issue a rejection letter, and the student would never know," said Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed.</p>
<p>He said he had found serious mention of the University of Redwood on Asian higher-education blogs. The number of Chinese studying in the U.S. has exploded in recent years.</p>
<p>The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities said it was not aware of other such cases.</p>
<p>Reed College is an exclusive school with annual tuition and fees of just under $50,000. Last October, its administrators discovered that a Google search of Reed academics showed them also on faculty at University of Redwood.</p>
<p>Even Reed's history was stolen. "Redwood is named after the Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Redwood," says the Redwood site. Reed is named after Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed.</p>
<p>After Reed officials complained, Go Daddy, a web-hosting company that houses the University of Redwood site, briefly shut it down. But a Go Daddy representative said the site was re-enabled once Go Daddy ascertained that the "allegedly infringing material was removed."</p>
<p>But Reed's Messrs. Ringle and Myers said the infringement continues unabated, as will Reed's legal effort to shut it down. "Whoever did this went to some trouble to clone a good deal of material from the first three layers of the Reed College site and change all mentions of Reed to Redwood," said Mr. Ringle.</p>
<p>The college says it believes the website's domain is owned by somebody in China.</p>
<p>The Redwood website gives an address in Torrance, Calif., that belongs to a mail-forwarding company, said Mr. Myers. The site lists only a fax number.</p>
<p>Also potentially affected is College of the Redwoods, a university in Eureka, Calif. Its administrators couldn't be reached for comment."</p>
<pre><code> Love,
Dad
</code></pre>
<p>(¿)</p>