Jessica Custer was the pride of Hardwick, New Jersey.
She edited her high school newspaper, captained debate teams and stacked her résumé with biology, chemistry and chess club trophies. Her stellar record had earned her places at Georgetown, Princeton and even Harvard.
But in 1995, the brainy 18-year-old decided against America’s Ivy League.
She fell in love with England on a Girl Scouts trip two years prior, and had her eyes set on something grander than what the US had to offer.
‘It was the best of both worlds,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I could get a top-notch education, and go back to Great Britain.’
So Custer, now 48, wound up at a place few had ever heard of: Warnborough College.
Its glossy brochures dripped with images of Oxford’s spires, quads and elegant halls.
Its audio CD rattled off names like Gandhi, Einstein and Bertrand Russell. Its recruitment materials included a toll-free hotline: 1-800-95-OXFORD.
Overall, it sounded authentic enough to the prospective student.
Getting accepted into Oxford University (pictured) in the 1990s was like a dream come true for Jessica Custer
She imagined spires, quads, and getting dressed up to eat in an oak-panelled dining room (pictured)
Custer and her family, like dozens of others, thought she was enrolling in a bona fide Oxford college.
‘It looked completely legitimate,’ she said.
In reality, she was signing up for what became known as ‘Fake Oxford’ – a sham school based not in the city of dreaming spires, but in a drafty country estate miles away, plagued with massive spiders and broken promises.
Custer’s journey began with a thrill. Landing at Heathrow, she boarded a van labeled as a shuttle to her new campus.
As it rolled into Oxford, Custer’s heart raced. She saw the medieval towers of Exeter, Lincoln and Hertford colleges pass by out the window.
‘Everybody on the bus was getting excited,’ she remembered.
But the van didn’t stop. It kept driving through Oxford, into the hills and then, astonishingly, through a cow pasture.
That’s when alarm bells seemed to ring in everyone’s mind.
‘Hey, where are we going?’ other students murmured. The shuttle finally pulled up at Boars Hill, a sleepy hamlet outside town. This, she was told, was Warnborough College.
Custer had crossed the Atlantic imagining candlelit halls and grand libraries. Instead, she found herself trudging into a damp old estate.
‘We pulled up at this old manor house… there was no kitchen, no cafeteria, no classrooms, no library,’ she said.
‘And when I went to take a shower after hours of travel, I found spiders the size of tarantulas above me.’
She decided the shower could wait.
Pictured: Dr Brenden Tempest-Mogg, the Australian-born president of Warnborough College
Outside, the lawns were filled with equally bewildered newcomers from the US, Russia, Japan and the Middle East.
Some had already gone into Oxford city center to investigate the situation. They returned in tears.
‘I thought, ‘This is not a good sign.”
The next morning, Custer and two other Americans went straight to the real University of Oxford admissions office.
The staff there were sympathetic but blunt.
‘We are really sorry that this is going on. But these people have nothing to do with us,’ the students were told.
When the teenagers begged if there was still some way to join Oxford, the answer was crushing: absolutely not.
Desperate, they caught a bus to London to plead with US diplomats. The consulate offered no lifeline either.
They were told that ‘Warnborough isn’t breaking any laws’ and were advised to get out as soon as possible.
That night, she stayed in a bed-and-breakfast, went to see The Usual Suspects at a local cinema, and steeled herself for the hardest call of her life. She had to tell her parents.
‘I was just hysterical. It probably took five minutes before they could even understand what I was saying. I said I was coming home.’
Back at Boars Hill, Custer demanded a meeting with the man responsible: Dr Brenden Tempest-Mogg, the Australian-born president of Warnborough College.
Custer was frightened but furious. She told him she was leaving and demanded her money back.
She strong-armed Tempest-Mogg into promising a 50 percent refund, even though he tried to avoid signing the letter.
Warnborough College had none of the majestic quads that the American freshmen expected to find. Pictured above is a quad at a University of Oxford campus
She recalled, ‘When I told him he had lied to us all, he just smirked and said, ‘Some people can’t handle the pressure of being away from mommy and daddy.”
Armed with the letter, Custer packed her bags and flew back to New Jersey.
She was among the first to quit, but within weeks, about 15 American students had fled.
The exodus caught the eye of journalists.
A New York Times correspondent got wind of the debacle and went to visit Warnborough. She likened it to a ‘bad summer camp.’
Soon, CBS News piled on, airing a report that mocked the duped Americans.
‘How do you get from Warnborough College to Oxford? Study harder,’ the CBS anchor quipped.
A US judge later ruled that Warnborough’s brochures were ‘misleading and could easily cause any observer to believe that Warnborough College is a part of Oxford University.’
Another court ordered the school to repay $292,000 to 35 American families.
Custer was awarded $13,130 in restitution. She never saw a cent of it.
‘I got absolutely nothing back,’ she said. ‘We had all laid out $25,000 to $30,000 to get there. Nobody got anything.’
By the time she got back to New Jersey, the scholarships she’d once been offered by US universities had vanished as other students had claimed them.
She wound up enrolling at Allegheny College in 1996, later transferring to Duquesne University.
Unlike her classmates who went straight to Princeton or Harvard, she was saddled with debt and shame.
A quintessentially English cricket match between Oxford and Durham at The Parks in Oxford, in 1997
‘It was a hit to your confidence,’ she said.
‘You start questioning yourself – ‘Do I not read people well?’ You become leery, cautious, suspicious.’
Custer did recover. She built a career in social services, working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
She takes pride in her work. But she admitted the financial scars of Warnborough shaped her choices.
‘I lost a semester. I had to start over in January, already behind socially and academically.’
‘And the loans – interest on interest – left me in debt I would never have had otherwise.’
For years, the sting lingered. The girl who had once been destined for Harvard or Princeton found herself explaining to friends and colleagues how she had been fooled by Fake Oxford.
‘It was devastating. That one event potentially changed the trajectory of my life,’ she said.
Warnborough collapsed into liquidation in 1996 – but Tempest-Mogg simply resurrected it, later relocating to Canterbury, some 130 miles away, on the other side of London. As of 2021, the school still claimed hundreds of students worldwide.
The college did not answer the Daily Mail’s requests for a comment or an interview with Tempest-Mogg.
When asked in an interview with Slate what he would say to the students who felt duped, Tempest-Mogg said: ‘I think two words: Move on.
‘We’ve all had bad experiences and setbacks, and it’s not sunny every day, and we just have to accept the bad with the good, move on, and put it down as a learning experience. And perhaps if they’ve had children, they’ve been able to give them some extra wisdom from their own experience.’
Responding to Tempest-Mogg’s statement, Custer said, ‘there clearly seems to be a significant level of arrogance… narcissistic tendencies.
Pictured: The dome of the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library and the quad of All Souls college in evening light in Oxford, England
‘Almost as if he thinks, “If they were dumb enough to fall for my scheme, they deserved it”.’
For Custer, the sting of 1995 never entirely faded. She had believed she was destined for Oxford, a degree that would unlock the world.
Instead, she came home with nothing but debt, humiliation and a worthless piece of paper.
Her story became a cautionary tale, warning generations of American students about too-good-to-be-true offers and glossy brochures.
‘If you can, go see a place in person. Ask about refund policies, insurance, accreditation,’ she said for anyone looking at colleges.
‘And read the fine print.’
