BOSTON (AP) - A Massachusetts man charged with keeping about $5 million in tuition and fees from the families of international students he had recruited to attend private U.S. schools has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Keenam “Kason” Park, 59, of Weston, faces more than four years in prison and full restitution at sentencing at a date that has not yet been determined, according to a statement Tuesday from the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston.
Park’s firm, EduBoston, collected tuition and other payments from students’ families for the 2019-2020 academic year but failed to give those payments to partnering schools, prosecutors said.
Park instead used the funds on unrelated expenses, including personal expenses, prosecutors said.
EduBoston also collected advance tuition and other payments for the 2020-2021 academic year, which Park failed to return to the students’ families after EduBoston went out of business around September 2019, authorities said.
“Mr. Park, a career businessman, husband and father with no prior involvement in the justice system decided to immediately accept responsibility because his singular focus is restitution for the families who worked with his former company, EduBoston,” Park’s lawyer, Vikas Dhar, said in a statement.
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