On April 30, 2026, College Board filed a federal lawsuit in the Middle District of Pennsylvania against Jeremy Karmasek, Alexander Rembisz, and their website genie.study. The 26-page filing alleges that the defendants built and sold software that bypasses the security restrictions on College Board’s digital testing platform, Bluebook, and feeds exam questions to a chatbot while a student is taking the test. Auto SAT, priced at $499.99 then overlaid correct answers onto the test taker’s screen in real time. The College Board is seeking more than a million dollars and injunctive relief, a legally-binding court order that would require Karmasek and Rembisz to permanently halt their actions. It is the first known federal legal action to emerge from a rapidly growing underground market for cheating tools and leaked exam materials.
Over the following 12 days, a Tatler investigation documented sellers in multiple Discord servers distributing exam materials for more than a dozen Advanced Placement (AP) subjects, including Calculus AB, Psychology, English Language, Physics C, both versions of Computer Science, Chemistry, Microeconomics, and Environmental Science. In some cases, materials from the Eastern time zone administration were obtained and sold to students in later time zones before their exams began, and in others, customers received the exam version for their actual time zone. One seller posted a “PST 100% Match” for Environmental Science at 10:20 a.m. on May 15, noting the material had been “on hand” since 8:08 a.m. Eastern. Tatler was able to independently verify that the questions leaked for four of the AP exams were exact matches.
At 5:45 a.m. PDT on the morning of May 4, 2026 — the first day of the AP exams — a Discord user operating under the handle “Murky” posted a message to a private server. “We [f——] got it. Sending out in tickets rn.” Within minutes, paying customers in the server began receiving materials for the AP Biology exam. By 9:25 a.m., Murky posted again: “AP Micro[economics] domestic on hand. Ping me right now if you’ve bought.” That afternoon, he had the international version of the AP Chemistry exam. “This [s—-] was very hard to get,” he wrote, “so only make a ticket if you have a higher budget.”
Prices started as low as $50 for a single exam, with sellers competing and undercutting each other’s prices. They openly posted timestamped proof that they were the first to obtain each test and issued refunds when a version turned out to be wrong. “Some APs have been great, some have been god awful,” Murky wrote at the end of the first week. These findings are based on more than 12 months of monitoring, beginning in May 2025. All evidence supporting this investigation was captured through Document Object Model snapshots, which are full copies of the Discord page structure displayed to users, including exact timestamps. During that investigation, Tatler was able to observe several months of preparation for the two-week examination period in which nearly three million American students would sit for AP exams administered by the College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT, PSAT, and Advanced Placement programs. Tatler was also able to observe preparations for cheating operations on the June administration of the SAT.
The “Auto SAT” tool, which is the center of the College Board’s civil complaint, is only a single example of more than a dozen products sold across a network of Discord servers with thousands of members. In addition to AI “overlays” that solved multiple-choice questions for test takers, students on the East Coast who took the AP exams were paid thousands of dollars to “leak” the test questions, either through taking photographs of test content or writing them down. Others were able to obtain AP proctor and coordinator accounts. AP coordinators are authorized to handle all physical and digital test materials.
In a 2024 announcement regarding the adoption of digital-format AP exams, the College Board cited a rise in cheating-related incidents as one of the major drivers of the decision. The evidence documented in this investigation suggests the transition did not significantly affect the cheating market. A seller on April 29 warned his server that College Board investigators had infiltrated the community and were “blending in using slang language.” He continued selling what he called “mock” AP exams. On May 2, two days after the College Board filed its complaint and two days before AP exams began, a second seller operating under the handle “Fenrir” posted a lengthy announcement in a separate Discord server. He addressed the lawsuit directly, stating, “As you know, collegeboard is currently in some of the comm[unity] servers. They are targeting anyone who sells any sort of Collegeboard material.” He then wrote, “For the following two weeks of exams we will have resources for all AP Exams. We are one of two servers which have a true source for these resources.” Materials would arrive three hours before the start of the exam in Eastern time. Over the next 12 days, Fenrir and Murky would post timestamped claims of having “study guides,” a colloquial term the cheating community uses to mean “answers,” for a dozen AP exams.
On May 7, after nearly a week of distributing AP materials, Fenrir raised his minimum price to $250 per exam, while others undercut competitors by reselling leaked versions of the test for as low as $50. “We are now one if not the prime source of materials on discord,” Fenrir wrote. On May 16, the day after the regular window for AP testing ended, Murky thanked customers and pivoted to selling answers for the late testing window and ACT materials. “We can guarantee a 36 [out of 36],” he wrote of the June ACT. As of May 2025, one group has begun prematurely selling the answers to the June ACT for a price in a group buy with an entry price of $100, and another brought their price down from $2,500 to $500 dollars. Other sellers have previously sold the ACT for anywhere between $2,000 and $7,500 and SAT cheating software for $500.
The organization is aware that its exams are being compromised. The complaint states that College Board expended resources to identify the defendants, worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deplatform genie.study, purchased a copy of Auto SAT to evaluate it, and pushed code changes to Bluebook to prevent the software from functioning. The defendants, the complaint alleges, quickly published an updated version, although the filing gave no specific dates or timelines for that allegation. After AWS deplatformed the service, the complaint alleges the defendants switched to using a web-hosting service based in Iran. The College Board alleges that using an Iranian infrastructure provider violates regulations issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an agency under the U.S. Treasury Department. U.S. law currently prohibits importing goods and services from Iran, and the complaint notes that civil penalties for such violations can reach $377,700 per transaction.
Genie.study launched the Auto SAT product on March 5, 2026, nine days before the March 14 international SAT. According to the complaint, at least four test takers ran Auto SAT during that exam alone. A Tatler investigation identified at least 28 individuals who likely had possession of original or resold Auto SAT software. On April 22, 2026, the College Board’s general counsel wrote letters demanding the defendants immediately and permanently take down their website, stop selling and distributing Auto SAT and any similar software, remove all related Discord and social media channels, and provide the College Board with a list of every customer who had purchased the product along with their contact information. In the letter to Rembisz, a student at Purdue University, the general counsel wrote: “If you are even contemplating not complying with these demands, I strongly advise you to speak to a lawyer. It is likely you don’t appreciate your situation.” The College Board’s complaint alleges that the laws violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Economic Espionage Act, which carry penalties of up to fifteen million dollars in fines and more than a decade in prison. Violations of the latter law are exclusively investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On April 28, the deadline, Karmasek emailed College Board’s general counsel requesting a 14-day extension to retain an attorney and review the allegations, proposing a new response date of May 12. That window would have extended past the May 2 SAT and through the majority of the AP exam period, which ran from May 4 to May 15. Coincidentally, the defendants had previously indicated in their genie.study Discord forum that they intended to offer a new product called “Auto AP” starting May 4. The College Board’s counsel responded that while the deadline to formally reply to the letter could be extended, the deadline to stop the unlawful conduct could not. On April 29, the defendants posted publicly in their genie.study Discord server about the cease-and-desist letters, writing to their community: “remember everything is arguable, with a lawyer present.” On April 30, College Board filed the lawsuit, represented by WilmerHale and Pietragallo Gorden Alfano Bosick & Raspanti, both of which are consistently ranked by the National Law Journal as among the most prominent law firms in the nation.
The College Board’s complaint reveals an incredibly resource-intensive enforcement process that begins with identifying a singular product, reverse-engineering it, pushing a code fix, and then pursuing legal action. The filing describes this cycle playing out with a single piece of software — the Auto SAT. During the same period, this investigation identified more than two dozen sellers operating across multiple servers, each using different methods to cheat on College Board exams. When one seller was shut down, new ones appeared. When one seller group disbanded, a successor organization was announced within days.
In the College Board’s words, “These tests [the SAT and AP Exams] have become critical mainstays in the U.S. education system by providing a standardized benchmark for college readiness and academic success.” In their filing, the College Board confirmed that students who used Auto SAT during the March 14 international SAT were disqualified and barred from taking future College Board exams. The organization did not respond to a request for comment about the filing.
AP scores are expected this summer. Nearly three million students are expecting scores to use for college credit and admissions at universities across the United States and abroad. The scores that students receive this summer will include an unknown number obtained through materials purchased on Discord, sometimes for less than the cost of the exam itself.
This investigation is ongoing. The College Board did not respond to a request for comment. Karmasek and Rembisz could not be reached for comment.
