getting answers. the competition to snag a reservation at popular bay area restaurants has given rise to new scams on social media. the telltale signs that you need to know about and

speaking of dining out san francisco restaurant week is back in november and coincides with the apex summit that will bring world leaders here. so restaurants are rolling out some special deals. but first, another twist in our viral story last week about the palo alto teen rejected by 16 colleges. now working as a software engineer for google at age 81, you're watching getting answers. i'm kristen sze. now, last week we introduced you to stanley xiong, a graduate of palo alto's gunn high school, the kid who founded his own documents, mining startup, and was first recruited by google when he was only 13, when they discovered his code got rejected by nearly every school, including state schools like cal poly and uc davis. >> some of them were certainly expected. you know, stanford, mit, you know, it's it is what it is, right? but yeah, for some of them, like cal poly, some of the state schools, i really thought, you know, i had a good

chance and it turns out however good of a chance i had, i didn't get in. >> stanley's story went viral around the world and now now even elon musk has weighed in twice. here's one tweet that says what is actually happened is that you can no longer trust elite college guys and have to test people in dependently for engineering ability. joining us live now to talk about all the reaction and a movement that he is now launching is stanley's father, nan xiong. hi, nan. nice to have you back on. >> thanks for having me so what do you think? >> i'll start here because everybody's wondering, what do you think elon musk is trying to say with that tweet? right. >> well, that's ellen being ellen. i cannot really say too much about it, but what do you think about it? um, but i think it's a good thing that it's saying that a lot of people are saying this is something that doesn't quite make sense. perhaps we should really take a deeper look. that's what i'm taking away from it. >> all right, well, we've seen

this huge response to stanley's story. what are you seeing on your end? >> oh, yeah. so a couple of things that's really went way beyond anything that i imagined i imagined initially. um. one thing was that received a lot of a emails from parents who shared their their kids went through college admission process maybe a year ago, a couple of years ago and got actually similar results than stanley did. of course, they were not less lucky as stanley when stanley actually got a job offer from google. so he kind of bypassed this issue. but it is a real issue that a lot of kids are facing. in one had a received a comment from someone saying, hey, he already got admission into ut austin wants to complain, why bother with this argument with the uc system? my answer to that is, you know what, let's put aside the tuition difference. just looking at the admission rate, if an accident student, a student with a good record can

only get about 10% admission, that is not a great way to guarantee they can actually get a good education and maybe some maybe someday someone with a similar profile would get no admission. guess what? i posed that as a hypothetical question. a parent emailed me his kid had a 4.0 gpa and one major awards and indeed he got no admission. he ended up going to community college. so seeing that problem, seeing that kind of a situation on again and again makes me even more convinced that stanley's case is not isolated. >> okay. so if that is what you believe, what are you going to do about it now? because i know you've gotten a groundswell of people reaching out to you. and i know when you were here, you both talked about liking to see more transparency in the admissions process. so what are you doing? >> absolutely. i think transparency is the key word that we're emphasizing. and again and again and over the weekend, we organized a volunteer kickoff event. we set up a signup form. so far, already 96 people already

volunteered to join the organization. and we laid out nine different aspects of efforts that we want to pursue to. and also yesterday afternoon, there was this organization called alliance for impact. they invited me onto their weekly webinar and the 500 plus people showed up and it was a very interesting discussion. yeah and we're we're just getting started. >> that is some video that they shared from that zoom meeting that you had in which you referred to 500 people being there. so what is it that you presented? i know you talked about some ideas you have for transport agency. can you share with our viewers maybe a couple of the ideas that you think may be feasible? >> yeah, so that's where i think a dialog would be super helpful. first of all, i believe holistic review is a good approach, but it should not be construed as black bag, a black box reviews. and that's what the problem we're having. i believe in the democracy. every power should have checks and balances and we're not seeing enough of that

for the admission process. on top of that, if you have heard of the varsity blues scandal a few years ago, it's already something that people are losing trust in. the college admission process of. so i think it is we're at the point where we need more transparency and more accountability into this process . in that regard, we're proposing some basic ideas so just like any financial results of a public company, it needs to be audited for people to have confidence in it, to have reasonable guarantee of its integrity. and i think we can also use a similar approach and have an independent third party that audit a subset, random subset of students application and their results. and therefore the parents and the students can have some assurance that the process has integrity and the second idea, we're floating around is that a lot of people are speculating, again, emphasize the word speculating. we don't know for sure because the black box people are speculating that stanley got rejected by some of the state

schools because he's, quote unquote, overqualified. so we'd like to find out if the college admission offices do have a practice of rejecting overqualified students. and what is the definition of overqualified and why do they do that? i was just about to ask you, like, what is the definition right? >> who's to say? so you're saying you want to see some metrics, right, for what is qualified at this institution, right? >> yeah. if you're rejecting students because they're overqualified, as some people are speculating that is a very interesting like situation we should look into, like the fear that you won't enroll. >> therefore, if we accepted you, that brings down our yield so that brings down the yield is the thing that came up. >> yeah, exactly. okay >> i want to ask you, i know this has come up. stanley's decisions obviously came before the supreme court ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions. the decision came about, of course, because the plaintiffs allege harvard discriminated against asian applicants. do you think that was at play here as some of the social comments suggest?

>> well, there's a lot of again, a lot of speculation as far as i'm concerned. the truth of the matter is that i don't know, because the black box, there's not enough data, not enough evidence for us to draw a conclusion. one way or another. that's where, again, we're keeping for transparent tsay okay. >> so i take it then you also wouldn't be able to say if you think it would have made a difference whatsoever had that decision come down a few months earlier, that we actually have a pretty good educated guess because you see actually has a not a you see the state of california in the 1990s actually passed a law that bans the use of race in college admission process. >> and so as far as the california state schools are concerned, that's not that's not a factor even before the supreme court ruling. okay >> look, we should mention that you work at google as well. and some people think that's given stanley an advantage. i don't want to take up too much time on that here because stanley has addressed this himself. and so that he probably got a head start on coding. right. and has

a better understanding of the corporate culture. but i want to know if you think elite companies such as google and others should also change up their hiring practices. >> actually, stanley asked the recruiter explicitly, do they care about college degrees? and the answer was no. it's a clear no, not maybe. or if it's just no, as long as you can pass the interview. so all the technical problems, that's all google cares about as far as i can tell. but but again, i'm not speaking on behalf of you. >> right. but that's not a lot of companies. right. and i wonder if more companies are being like a google or if they're setting the new bar. do you think there's going to be less emphasis on elite college admissions, which does bring me back to the question of, you know, does it still matter? >> that's an interesting question. that's one of the other topics we discuss on sunday, which is centered around the idea of how do we elevate students, all students, out of the zero sum game of college admission? because let's face it, college admission is a zero sum game. there are only so many

spots somebody is getting in and somebody is not getting it. so there are some ideas around that as well, including setting up some sort of an incubator for really talented kids that they no longer need the technical training of the colleges, but they can use some help in other aspect of getting their own business going so that is one way of thinking about how to go beyond the traditional path of college admission. >> all right. so i wonder what are your next steps? you said you had this meeting. you said you got some teams of volunteers. so what's next for you? yeah so we're organizing ourselves into several sub teams. >> one is focusing on collecting similar cases, like we mentioned earlier, a lot of cases like that. and we'd like to collect as much data as possible and the more data we have, the better sense we can get. how prevalent this problem may be and secondly, we want to reach out to the colleges, i think is really important to have a dialog with. some people keep asking me, are you going to pursue a lawsuit? i think that's pretty mature, to be honest. and if you think about it, if we

actually bring a lawsuit to the system, they're going to defend it. and they're going to use taxpayer dollars for it. and i just don't think that's a good use of taxpayer money. and so i'd rather have a collaborative approach, approach them, have a conversation and let them understand our perspective. i'd like to understand their perspective, understand their constraints, understand how we can actually find a common ground and find solutions. so that's the second approach. and the second is we're taking. >> all right. well, i know it's a long journey and i know you're having conversations with people, so do keep us posted. john stanley jones, father, thank you so much. much. >> thanks for having me. >> when we come back, the scammers taking advantage of the vibrant bay area restaurant scene.

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was a disturbing trend. instagram imposters pose as restaurants, causing a huge headache and financial losses for customers. is joining us live now to talk about her article chronicle food reporter elena kadvany. elena, thanks for your time. thanks for having me. so restaurant instagram scams are now a thing. can you tell us how they work? >> yeah, it's very strange. i started noticing this pop up just on my personal instagram feed in the last few months, restaurants i follow would screenshot these fake accounts and ask their followers to help report them to instagram. they appear to work in different ways and it's very unclear why they're targeting bay area restaurants. some messages seem to be sort of like phishing scams where they want the users to click on a link and then might ask you to reset your

password. and other ones, including one person who fell for it, was a offer of a discount dinner deal at a famous restaurant. >> so do any restaurants actually have this where you click on a link and pay money to reserve something or buy something? >> is that you know, i'm just wondering how people get tricked, right? does that actually happen with non imposters? >> yes. like if you're booking a reservation on the service talk, sometimes restaurants require a deposit, but it looks very different. i mean, it looks much more legitimate and like the tone and the wording of some of these messages, i think are a little they should make you skeptical if you receive one of them. >> so which restaurants have had these imposter accounts recently ? >> several have been hit. john's grill in san francisco, which is a very long time restaurant, dalida, which is a newer restaurant in the presidio, alkali rye, which is a drink

store in oakland. so a whole range of sort of like kind of businesses being targeted, right? >> and they're kind of smart, right? i think they're targeting when there's something actually going on. i think john's grill was just in the news because they were celebrating an anniversary. so you know, people are going to their website or their instagram account, but how can you tell? you mentioned the tone doesn't seem quite right. how can you tell if it's not a real account? do you look at the handles? what do you look at? >> yeah. so i would first look at the handle they all have because they can't copy the exact handle they might have an underscore at the end or an extra period or something at the beginning. so if someone like that follows you and then you can go look up, just search for the real restaurant and i think you'll pretty easily pull up and be able to see the difference between the real account and the fake account. the fake accounts also only one of them i saw had actual photos on it that they had pulled from the real restaurant. but most of them it's just an empty feed that looks quite strange. >> okay. >> how are restaurants combating

this? well they feel kind of hopeless. >> there's not much they can do except report these account s and they were all quite frustrated with the response from meta feeling like the accounts were not taken down soon enough. i just checked before we got on the fake john grill account is still up and it's been up for a few weeks. despite being reported. so i think that's sort of like the bigger question of how meta is responding. and obviously this is not concerning as concerning as some other scams or harmful content on instagram, but an issue nonetheless, don't they have verification checks. they do. i don't know the exact process for getting one. i think some businesses have them, some of them don't. and also some of the responses that people who flagged these accounts, they got a response from instagram saying that they don't violate community guidelines. the company. but in several cases they did. they were sending fake links like the john's grill scam

or pulling like the restaurant's photos without their permission. >> what did metas, which is instagram's parent company, tell you? >> did you reach out to them? did they say anything? >> i tried several times to speak to someone there, and i didn't get any response. >> all right. >> elena, do you know if this is happening to any other industries or is it just restaurant because of the particulars of the industry? >> i don't. i mean, i've heard anecdotally also it happening to individuals, just their personal accounts. so i don't think it's isolated to restaurants. it's just sort of a strange phenomenon that's happening here right now. all right. >> so how can people stay vigilant and confirm they're paying for something real and not a scam? >> i would be careful before you click on anything that's sent to you on the internet. i think i get training at work all the time to avoid phishing scams. and i think we all get scam phone calls and texts a lot. anything that gives you pause, i would just think you know, before clicking. >> all right. as i've chronicled

food reporter elena kadvany with an interesting article on the scams surrounding fake restaurant accounts on instagram. >> really appreciate your time. >> thank you. >> up next, what's cooking with san francisco's fall restaurant week is going to be bigger than ever. so

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diversity of cuisines is prevalence of emerging food adds, flavor trends and residents appetites for more varied menus. other cities ranked in the top five include la miami, washington, d.c. and san diego. and one of the best showcases for san francisco's dining prowess is the fall sf

restaurant week. the twice annual event returns on friday, november 3rd, and is actually being extended by four days to thursday, november 16th. and there's a good reason for that. joining us live now to discuss this year's event is amy cleary, the director of public policy and media relations for the golden gate restaurant association. amy, thanks for joining us. thanks for having me. all right. so don't keep us waiting. why is restaurant week being extended this year? >> because i think all of us locally and i guess probably everybody internationally knows as well that apec is coming to san francisco and we wanted to extend to make certain that the apec attendees could take advantage of our great restaurant scene that you just talked about. >> yeah, apec is the leader of asia pacific leaders, and that includes almost a couple of dozen, you know, nation economies or member economies. that's the word they wanted us to use. and of course, all the world leaders will be here, journalists. so it's a big deal. so tell us about how san

francisco restaurants are getting ready. >> i think we're getting ready. you know, we're signing people up for restaurant week. we're going to announce tomorrow morning the full list. we have over 200 participants, which are downtown places, but also places throughout the city. we worked with a lot of diverse neighborhoods, including chinatown and japantown and bayview, to really expand the reach. and it's great because we'll have lunch options, very inexpensive lunch options, all the way up to sort of fancier dinner options. so they'll hopefully be something for everybody who's participating. >> that's fantastic. so the kickoff is tomorrow, is that right? >> the kickoff is november 3rd. so we've got the event. >> i mean, the big announcement. >> the announcement. yes. the here's the official list of exactly. and it'll be on our you know, that's our restaurant week site. and people can go there and they can actually there are there are buttons that they can click which will make it easy for them to make a reservation. we wanted to get the list out early to give people time, you know, to plan instead of we're not good with last minute. so giving a week or two to make a

reservation helps people a lot, right? >> can you reveal any of the restaurants at this point? >> can i reveal any of the restaurants? >> you know what? i can really say is, you know, we've focused a lot on getting some of the neighborhoods that we think will be inviting for guests. i was saying we did a special outreach this year to japan town, which is great. we've we signed up some more there than we've had before. and we reached out again. we've worked really closely with an organization in chinatown to get some people there. so a lot of a lot of downtown places, a lot of a lot of regulars i can say that along with restaurant week, we do eat drink in the fall and we're doing special events. one downtown at the vault steakhouse on november 3rd, one in the mission inn at curio on november eighth, and then one on the 12th at scoma's. so getting a real diversity of places involved. >> all right. can i ask you if you're doing or if you know, the restaurants are doing some special prefix things? yeah >> so what they do is they do they do a set menu and there are set menus for lunch as low as ten, $15. wow and usually, you

know, that would be a place that probably do something like, you know, a soda, a burrito and a you know, maybe maybe a dessert. and then, you know, all the way up at dinner to $90, which would be a fancy or sit down menu, you know, often with some choices. but definitely a fancier experience. wow >> but look at that dinner like prefix. you can have like somewhere from 30 to $90. that sounds like a deal for san francisco. yeah i think it's i think it's a great deal. >> and what's nice again is it's a real diversity of cuisines. it's not just it's not just one thing. there's chinese, there's japanese, there's mexican, there's, there's a little bit of everything. and i think that's really great. it's a chance to, you know, we always say to like, go back to your favorites because they need your support. but also, you know, to take a look at the list and see, wow, i've heard about this place. i've always wondered. it's a great chance to try it. >> you know, we just ran a story that says san francisco is the most food forward city in the country. >> why do you think san francisco is deserving of that honor? >> i think we have a little bit

of everything. and i think something that san francisco does really well and i say this all the time, we have great bakeries. we have great burrito shops, we have great takeout places. but we also have some of the most highly rated, you know, michelin star restaurant in the world. and i think that's that's really the sweet spot we have. we have something for everyone yummy at any price range. >> right. and i wonder if this year's restaurant week also comes at a very important time, especially i mean, i know it really varies depending on the neighborhood in san francisco, but there's still some that are still struggling for foot traffic and still trying to bring business back. so do you think restaurant week plays a big part in that? >> yeah, we're really hopeful that it will make a difference. you know, it has been a hard year for some people. i think particularly with getting the year started out with all the rain and bad weather and kept a lot of people at home. so we're really hoping that restaurant week at a time of year, which is sort of a little bit slow before we get into the holiday season, will give a boost to people, you know, throughout the city. >> that sounds fantastic. all right. where can folks go to get more information on sf

restaurant week in november? >> yeah, it'll be just right on the restaurant week website. again we will list everything starting tomorrow morning. >> all right. so check back then. thank you so much. really appreciate your time. >> thank you. have a great evening. >> all right, amy, a reminder, you can get our live newscasts breaking news, weather and more with our abc7 bay area streaming tv app. it's available on apple tv, google tv, fire tv and roku. just search abc7, bay area and download it now. we'll be right back

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course, you'll want to stay tuned for the 4:00 news when i'll be back. then thanks for joining us. have a great day. bye bye. >> whit: tonight breaking news as we come on the air. tonight here hamas now releasing a video, appearing to show one of their hostages, a 21-year-old, a young woman and her plea. the family giving permission for the world to see and what she