Ms. Giannulli, an influencer with big audiences on YouTube and Instagram, posted sponsored content about being a student.
Olivia Jade Giannulli, whose parents are two of the dozens of people accused of cheating to get their children into elite colleges, quickly capitalized on her student status when she began her first semester at the University of Southern California in the fall of 2018.
Ms. Giannulli, 19, is the daughter of the actress Lori Loughlin and the designer Mossimo Giannulli, whose fashion brand was sold at Target until 2017. Ms. Giannulli is a social media influencer with close to two million YouTube subscribers and over a million Instagram followers. In September, she posted two paid advertisements on Instagram that highlighted her identity as a student.
The legitimacy of her college acceptance has been called into question as a result of a Justice Department indictment, along with that of a number of others .
On Tuesday, as part of a federal investigation known internally as “Operation Varsity Blues,” government prosecutors charged a network of people with conspiring “to use bribery and other forms of fraud” to game the college admissions process. The indictment lists a variety of deceptive tactics, including having children falsely designated as athletic recruits; bribing proctors to edit answers on standardized college-entry exams; and hiring people to pose as students to raise grade-point averages.
Some students involved in the scandal were unaware that their parents had acted on their behalf, and prosecutors from the Justice Department emphasized that the children had not been the targets of the investigation.
After Ms. Giannulli arrived on campus, she began to incorporate college into her personal brand.
