There is no question in my mind Tyrone Hankerson didn’t technically do anything illegal. He cultivated relationships along with an excellent academic standard to milk as much financial aid out of Howard as he could.
He didn’t approve those grants and stipends, someone else did. While the majority of the money went towards school, he didn’t shy away from using some to front for the gram. He is dealing with a gift and curse of fake flossing.
His name will now be synonymous with being a scammer, even if he did what most people would probably do if given the opportunity. His only crime is playing his character a little too well, with that being said calling his classmates broke wasn’t very nice.
The Washington Post had details on how the legal finessing went down.
The $400,000 in scholarships cited seems large, said Hankerson’s attorney, James Walker, but could be accounted for via quick calculations: four years of undergrad and multiple summer terms, plus $60,000 per year for three years of law school tuition and housing.
“We cannot provide any documents as it would hurt his legal case right now,” Walker said, declining to expound on how Hankerson spent the money.
Could he have used some of the financial aid on clothing, travel, or other personal items? “Every student uses money for survival,” Hankerson told the journalist Roland Martin in an interview. “One hundred percent of us have done that.”
Walker, who himself graduated from Howard, describes the Howard financial aid office as having the environment of “a church league” — built as much on relationships as on official policy. “It’s a common practice at Howard that when freshmen arrive, the first thing their parents do is roll up to the administration building,” says Walker, whose children and younger relatives attended the school.
Students who found themselves short, Walker says, could arrange a meeting: “The right official, he or she could push a button and your account was made whole.”
Tyrone’s undergraduate classmates told each other they’d always known something was up, said one. They wryly recalled times Tyrone called them “broke.”
“He’s a meme. He’s a joke,” McCollum said. “If we see him on campus . . . well, I think he has booked a flight to as far away as he can get.”
“I got caught in a storm,” he says. “And the best thing that anyone can do in that situation is go to shelter.” Hankerson went online and quickly started to delete himself: His Instagram account. His Facebook. Tumblr. Twitter. SoundCloud.
And Happenings by Hank, the blog that represented everything he’d learned about presenting well and moving well through the world — he deleted that, too.
But his photos were already spread, divorced of the context he’d given them. He was mocked for “flossing” (flashing his wealth), “fronting” (pretending to be something he wasn’t) and for, conveniently, bearing the name of an Erykah Badu song about men who are mooches.
Live by social media, die by social media.
Tyrone is planning on suing Howard if they don’t clear his name.
Flip the page for photos of Tyrone fake flossing on social media.