Not a college application but I did know a young lady in the youth organization I work with who generously padded her figure skating accomplishments on her yearly bio. The first year I heard her do that, I kind of scratched my head and went "huh? I don't remember seeing her name as a Nationals competitor," then went back to my hotel room and powered up my laptop to do a search for her skating results. I found her listed as either scheduled to take or passing her pre-juvenile tests a couple years earlier but dismissed it, figuring she'd have to stop soon enough because people would cotton to her lies when she never made it to the Olympics. Instead, she continued for several more years and had her own advisers completely snowed. Finally, the last year she did it, I was so fed up at the end of our annual banquet because she had claimed she competed at a JGP in one of the Baltic nations and was aiming for the Olympics, so I went up to one of her advisers and told that person they needed to do some basic fact-checking before the girl submitted her bio the following year, and that this girl was NOT an international-level figure skater. Then, a couple months later, I laughed in the face of someone else who told me the girl was going to miss a yearly training retreat because she had a skating competition in Belize. In AUGUST! Yeah, no, burst that bubble with those folks and told them 1) there are no ice skating competitions in Belize, 2) Belize doesn't have a national skating federation so any competitions would be unsanctioned and the girl would lose her Olympic eligibility if she competed in one, and 3) there are no ice skating rinks in BELIZE! I lost track of the girl after that year, but I do know she's never made it to Nationals at any level in any discipline.
