It's never been particularly difficult to set up a basketball-oriented prep school. Before they began receiving high-profile media attention in 2006, such so-called diploma mills were endemic to the college recruiting experience. They were filled with players who took little to no classes, who attended their institutions solely for the purpose of playing basketball and raising their grades -- and grades is a relative term -- in time to qualify for major-college basketball.

The NCAA has cracked down, with varying degrees of success, in the years since. Yet there's only so much control the NCAA can exert. It can, for example, prevent a player who attended a diploma mill from qualifying academically to play college basketball. But it can't prevent the school from existing in the first place. It also can't -- and I'm just spitballing here -- prevent someone from creating a fake basketball academy in order to scam foreign prospects out of their limited cash before vanishing and leaving 16 to 18 of those prospects in a two-bedroom apartment without food for two days.

Because I'm not actually spitballing. (I'm not diabolical enough to think of that myself, thankfully.) Believe it or not, that appears to be exactly what happened in South Charleston, W. Va. From the Charleston Gazette:

South Charleston city officials are making arrangements to get nearly 20 kids home safely after they were apparently duped into thinking they were coming to South Charleston to attend a basketball academy.

"We found around 16 to 18 kids in a two-bedroom apartment sleeping on the floor," said South Charleston Mayor Frank Mullens. "They hadn't eaten in two days."

Mullens said it appears that Daniel Hicks, a South Charleston resident, recruited students from around the world to attend a fictitious prep school, brought them to the area and then "pulled a disappearing act."

"We're out now trying to take care of these kids who are here, even from overseas -- France and Africa -- that are under the impression they're going to a prep academy to get an education and play basketball," said Mullens.

It's a classic scam, no different than a ponzi scheme or a Nigerian email ruse: Sell people on a dream, require them to pay short-term money in exchange for long-term fulfillment, and bolt when you can't deliver on your promise. This sort of thing is as old as humanity itself. But even for the seedy world of prep and AAU basketball, preying on -- and then abandoning -- kids from France and Africa feels like a new low.

For what it's worth, Hicks told the Charleston Gazette that his school was legitimate and that the kids in South Charleston were brought to the school by another coach without Hicks' knowledge. Whether or not that's true, it's no explanation for the conditions the teenagers were found in. Nor does it explain the mayor's account of a woman from Indiana calling the town in search of her son, who she said was there under false pretenses. It doesn't explain why Hicks reportedly asked the woman for an additional $500, which is what caused her to become suspicious in the first place. It doesn't explain why Hicks didn't tell officials about the mix up, or offer to fly the kids back to their homes, or do something -- anything -- to prevent almost 20 of them from bunking down in a two-bedroom apartment by themselves.

Yahoo! high school blog Prep Rally spoke with Baltimore native Corey Saunders, the first player at the school to discuss the situation publicly. His account:

"When I got there we had to stay in a three room apartment, but we were promised to get beds, get fed three times a day, have our clothes washed," Baltimore teenager Corey Saunders, the first player at the school to speak publicly, told Prep Rally for a forthcoming story. "None of that happened. We were left at the gym three hours a day, had to get food for ourselves.

"A lot of players there didn't have a lot of money. We had to spend our own money for food. It was just bad. Once we got there we were finding out more things about his background. He had gone to jail for fraud, drugs. He had brought in coaches that he thought could land big players, but was telling them things on fraud."

After the players were found in the hotel, the city appealed to a local Ramada hotel, which allowed the players to stay until South Charleston officials could figure out how to proceed. Because Hicks potentially scammed players from all over the United States, the FBI is now likely to get involved as local police continue to investigate. All 20 of the players at the "school" have been sent home -- some on Greyhound buses, some with a coach to Oklahoma, the latter of which came after the town's assistant police chief rented a van and drove them.

Needless to say, the players -- who say they were required to pay $500 up front and $300 every month; Hicks disputes the claim -- were the true losers in all of this. From the Gazette:

[South Charleston police chief Brad] Rinehart said he didn't know how much money the kids paid to attend, but said they felt cheated.

"They're good kids. I put about seven of them on the bus last night and a couple of them hugged me goodbye," he said. "They felt cheated, like they got scammed and let down -- they put their trust in [Hicks]."

If this coach's scam was truly as brazen as it seems, those kids not only deserve an explanation or their money back. They deserve some justice, too.