How two dudes email-pranked 52,000 USC students

The email was startling.

“Dear Trojan students, I am pleased to announce that Rick Caruso has been selected the next USC President,” read an official-looking announcement that hit student inboxes late Tuesday night. “His confidence and faith in USC are inspiring, and his optimism is infectious.”

USC, it seemed, had dropped a bombshell announcement, abruptly ending its search for a new president and elevating the billionaire real estate mogul to the role.

Signed … Levi?

“April Fools’!” senior Levi Elias said in an interview at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, exulting after firing off his last batch of emails. “I’d like to think I got some people.”

The prank was massive in scale, reaching over 52,000 student inboxes. But this was not a high-tech operation, the screenwriting major said.

It started when he and senior Josh Wolk managed to acquire the behemoth list of student emails. (This year’s student body is around 47,000 strong, so the list likely includes some former students.)

The two declined to share how they found the list, lest bad actors abuse the system in the future.

Originally, they planned to exchange mundane meeting notes from The Sack of Troy — the campus satire paper that Elias writes for — and “accidentally” CC the entire student body. The paper’s staff would then start a “reply all” thread of wholly boring content.

Except, Elias’s laptop crashed when he tried to compose the huge email.

“He thought all hope was lost,” said Wolk, who’s a business major.

But hours later, the two discovered they could use Brightspace, USC’s learning management platform, to send mass emails. The dream was alive once more, and this time in the form of a fake presidential announcement.

Elias and Wolk floated several candidates they could name, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. Eventually, they landed on Caruso: It needed to be somewhat believable, Elias said, and also relatively innocuous.

“I’m not trying to get expelled,” he said.

Over five hours, the two students manually added semicolon separators between all the email addresses so the announcement would send properly. And because Brightspace puts a 1,000-person cap on its emails, they had to send the announcement in 53 rounds.

“I’m not the brightest man,” Elias said. “But what I do have is determination. And a fair amount of time.”

It is not entirely clear if the prank violated USC policy. Perhaps the most applicable line of the university’s acceptable use policy reads: “Shortcuts bypassing system’s security measures, as well as pranks and practical jokes involving the compromise of security measures, are prohibited.”

A university spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Asked if they had any message for USC students, the two pranksters hedged.

“I’m really busy,” Elias said. “I don’t know why I did this. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. It was the dumbest thing of all time.”

Then, he hung up the phone, and started sifting through the torrent of emails in his inbox.

Update: KTLA fell for the prank in an early Wednesday morning segment. The station has since issued a correction.

Related: Massive USC security failure could wreak digital havoc.

Tomo Chien can be reached at [email protected].