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Identity theft in education fraud

Bradley Lane Croft v. United States

Updated Nov 12, 2026

In brief

Where it stands
Dismissed

Petition denied.

What it’s about
Bradley Lane Croft argued that the Fifth Circuit should have corrected its mandate on whether using four instructors’ identities, rather than their qualifications and roles, was central to the alleged fraud and to later electronic payments that he said did not use those identities.
Who it affects
Croft received no Supreme Court review of his challenge, and the Court did not decide whether the Fifth Circuit handled the dispute correctly.

Summary: written with AI from the case record.

Illustration for Bradley Lane Croft, Petitioner v. United States
Conceptual illustration · AI-generated

What it's about

The Supreme Court refused to hear Croft’s case (denied review) and did not decide whether the Fifth Circuit handled the mandate improperly.

Croft argued that the Fifth Circuit wrongly treated use of the instructors’ identities as central, even though he said the later payment wires did not use them.

Question presented

1. Whether the Fifth Circuit abused its discretion in refusing to recall or clarify a post-GVR mandate after the panel resolved in the first instance, and attributed to “the trial court’s findings,” the disputed premise that use of the four instructors’ identities was itself the crux of the predicate fraud, where the Government’s witness, Rufus Cobum, the former director of TVC’s Veterans Education Program, described a composite representation concerning the instructors’ names, qualifications, employment, and proposed teaching roles and testified that names alone would not obtain approval; the panel relied on that same testimony; the trial court’s only identified description characterized the identity use as facilitation; no specific crux finding exists; and Judge Ho identified qualifications rather than names as a reasonable competing crux? 2. Whether the Fifth Circuit abused its discretion in refusing to correct a mandate that treated use of the four instructors’ identities in an antecedent composite TVC approval package as the crux of eight later payment-wire predicates under 18 U.S.C. § 1028A, where the charged payments arose from a separate composite VA enrollment-and-payment package that did not require or use those identities, and the connection between the two packages rested only on approval-chain causation and facilitation?

Documents

1

Docket activity

6
  • New analysis added

    Nov 12, 2026 · Court records

  • AI analysis generated: Case Briefing

    Nov 12, 2026 · Generated

  • AI analysis generated: Decision Record

    Nov 12, 2026 · Generated

  • Case data updated: summary, question_presented, generation_metadata

    Nov 12, 2026 · Court records

  • Case data updated: question_presented, extraction_metadata

    Nov 12, 2026 · Court records

Show 1 more
  • Brief added: Petition

    Jul 26, 2026 · Court records

More questions

1
Did the Court agree with the Fifth Circuit?
No. Refusing to hear Croft’s case did not endorse either side’s arguments.

Sources

Primary materials plus reporting. Best-effort analysis: this explainer relies on a mix of primary materials and trusted secondary sources. Official filings and opinions remain authoritative.

Checked Nov 12, 2026Methodology

Court records and filings

Reporting and analysis