In response to the Bull’s Eye article published about STUcollab, junior Tony Xu issued a statement claiming he was given falsified material regarding the internships offered to students. In this statement, Xu said he received his information from Sam Liu, who claimed to have connections at Morgan Stanley and KPMG.

“Due to the occurring of this major incident, many of the internships promised earlier were doomed by this incident and I sincerely apologize,” Xu said.

Xu said in his statement that Liu provided him names of employees from Morgan Stanley and KPMG for a consulting charge of $4,500. The statement said that Xu eventually realized that the information he was getting was false and reported it to the police. The statement did not address the falsified emails or letters. Xu said that he never revealed that he was being scammed out of fear for what his co-workers would think.

“I told them I know the employees personally because I tried to prove the connections I have to appease to my co-workers,” Xu said.

Since the release of the statement, the former members of STUcollab have spoken out about what they were told by Xu. Juniors Mark Tan, Jackson Lennon and Michael Cheng, addressed other unexplained issues with the company that were not mentioned in the statement, including promised plane tickets and questionable bank statements.

“Tony told us that he received over $100,000 in funding. We were suspicious of why anyone would donate that much, but he sent us a bank document from the United Bank of Switzerland,” Cheng said. “It was obviously false, there were multiple grammatical errors and the signatures were cut off.”

While working with them, Xu also told them he had arranged for  the members of the company to fly to Dallas, Texas. Eventually, they contacted American Airlines to find that the tickets had not been purchased, and the copy of the tickets they were shown was falsified.

“If he had mentioned to us earlier that he was being scammed, then the situation would make sense. Instead he acted like everything was under control and then suddenly created this story a month after the whole situation,” Lennon said. “We can’t believe his story that he was scammed if he lied about all this other stuff.”

Additionally, the former members of STUcollab emphasized that Xu never mentioned that his connections were from Liu, and that he claimed to have a personal relationship with employees from the company.

“He acted completely in control of the situation,” Tan said. “Frequently in the recruiting process, Tony would talk about how the alleged vice president of Morgan Stanley was his family’s personal financial advisor. He went off on his own and never mentioned anyone was connecting him to other people. Everytime he mentioned a new connection, he would say ‘I just got off the phone with so and so.’”