'Ghost' Students are Enrolling in US Colleges Just to Steal Financial Aid (apnews.com) 110
Last week America's financial aid program announced that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs."
Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..." Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.
And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges.
An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time...
Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.
Fortune found one community college that "wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president. The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris.
The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...
Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."
Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..." Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.
And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges.
An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time...
Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.
Fortune found one community college that "wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president. The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris.
The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...
Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."
Duplicate story from a month ago (Score:1, Offtopic)
This was posted May 8th
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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So can I post ghost my joke again?
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Not a duplicate (Score:5, Informative)
To make it more clear that this is new information, I'll go back in and add that to the very top of the story. (Although this was in the first version of Slashdot's post....)
The issue has become so dire that the Department of Education announced this month [June] that it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...
Re: Not a duplicate (Score:5, Informative)
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Only complete idiots think there is no waste, fraud and abuse in any organization. Much less one the size of the federal government. The trick is to actually find it. DOGE wasn't looking for it really. They had a list of programs they didn't like and just slapped the label on them. People to clean national park toilets is not "waste and fraud".
And at some point, the law of diminishing returns means the cost of hunting for it becomes more wasteful than the waste it's meant to stop.
Not to mention knock on effects.
Every now and then some blowhard I work with comes up with something like "look at all these bludgers in the pub, drinking off my tax money... blah, blah, bloody blah" without realising that he still pays fuck all in tax and due to his two kids, receives more in benefits than he pays in. But I digress, my response is "here, here's 5p
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And at some point, the law of diminishing returns means the cost of hunting for it becomes more wasteful than the waste it's meant to stop.
Cost-benefit calculations work for business because costs and benefits are both measured in dollars. Government programs almost by definition are not. How important are clean toilets? For a business the question is how much it costs and how many customers do you lose if you don't have clean toilets. Government isn't funded by customers, its funded by taxes, and the benefits aren't measured in dollars. What's it is worth to get the homeless a home is not measured in dollar signs.
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You all don't look stupid at all after spending months whining like babies about Elon and DOGE.
Right, no waste or theft to find.
I don't know what you're trying to say. Did anyone here claim there was no fraud in government financial schemes? From what I remember most of the whining was about the fact that Elon and DOGE didn't have a clue and in the end didn't actually uncover or reduce any fraud.
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You all don't look stupid at all after spending months whining like babies about Elon and DOGE.
Right, no waste or theft to find.
DOGE didn't find this.
Updated since then. (Score:4, Informative)
This is not a simple dupe because since then actions have been implemented to address the issue.
If you RTFS, "[Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity..." which was on June 6th, clearly later than May 8th.
300% MARGIN OF ERROR (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, 20%-60% "could be" ghosts. Sure, just like ghosts voting.
Any stat with a margin of error that high is just political puffery in preparation for killing off student aid.
We don't want educated people here. Defund science, burn books, imprison librarians.
All hail the King Orange.
Re:300% MARGIN OF ERROR (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: 300% MARGIN OF ERROR (Score:4, Funny)
The pork-filled Big Beautiful Bill didn't have any room left for free college. Especially for Universities that are doing liberal indoctrination and turning children into illegal immigrant trans Democrats.
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By transporting that child into another nation, illegally.
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Universities that are doing liberal indoctrination and turning children into illegal immigrant trans Democrats.
You seem super serious, Magat! How are universities turning children into illegal immigrants?
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Is your memory ok? There's a couple ways I can recall from the last 6 months, which the administration has attempted to varied levels of success.
1. Revoke natural citizenship for children born of illegals. This retroactively makes them illegal.
2. Revoke visas of foreign students who are currently enrolled or planned to attend. This retroactively makes them illegal.
3. Revoke visas of anyone from a specific set of countries. This retroactively makes the parents and children illegal.
4. Apprehend illegal citize
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Universities that are doing liberal indoctrination and turning children into illegal immigrant trans Democrats.
Again, the american education system has failed you.
Is your memory ok?
Are you eyes working?
mmmmQuotas (Score:2)
You seem super serious. How exactly do you turn a child into an illegal immigrant?
Thanks to quotas, ICE agents are dying to find out how.
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When those tax cuts hit it's going to freak out the bond markets and collapse the entire world economy.
But Elon needs to be the first trillionaire so we are all expendable
Re: 300% MARGIN OF ERROR (Score:5, Informative)
Curious what percent of the income taxes collected do the top 1% of filers pay?
The top 1% of tax filers paid 40.4% of all income taxes paid in 2022 [taxfoundation.org]
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So they have low taxes for a progressive tax system as the 1% have 30.8% of the wealth, or at least $13,666,778 of wealth (2023).
https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com] and others agree,
https://dqydj.com/top-one-perc... [dqydj.com]
I take it you are arguing that the 1% have surprisingly low taxes for a progressive tax system and the idea of cutting their taxes in favour of raising the bottom halves taxes is not good for society.
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The top 1% of tax filers paid 40.4% of all income taxes paid in 2022
They own 90% of the stuff, so they should have 90% of the income taxes. I think I see a problem.
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"illegal immigrant trans Democrats"
illegal immigrant trans-lesbian vegan Democrats
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It was $40M out of the military recruitment funds - without the parade it would have gone towards more billboards or TV ads for recruitment.
Biden used to throw another $100M in military aid at Ukraine every other week, in Washington terms, $40M isn't that much.
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Re: 300% MARGIN OF ERROR (Score:2)
Funny how the red state of California leads the scheme. Bad King Orange and his minions stealing from the poor.
You simply misunderstood. (Score:2)
Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts...
What this means is that Socure has many clients. Among those client's all have ghost applications. The percentage of ghost applications per school is 20% in the lowest case and 60% in the highest case.
almost impossible to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you could eliminate the middle man and make college free for most people. But that teaches the next generation the horrible experiment of socialism.
It's a slippery slope. Next you'll give them free health. That's terrible, they'll be waiting for days for medical treatment instead of skipping it entirely like under beautiful capitalism.
Free in-state tuition Re:almost impossible to stop (Score:1)
"make college free for most people."
Like we do for 12th grade already?
Sounds like tax dollars well spent to me, providing it is at least as rigorous as 12th grade and the students are real and from the taxing district paying for the school. Think "in-state tuition = $0".
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How long do I need to live here before I get the free tuition? (I'll be living in a tent downtown until I've been here long enough)
Re: Free in-state tuition Re:almost impossible to (Score:1)
How long? In most US states, in-state tuition is granted if you have lived in the state for a year in most cases. Check with a school in your state if you need particulars.
My point was that "free" - meaning paid for by all taxpayers whether they are taking classes or not - undergraduate college tuition is actually a good thing for society, just as "free" K-12 schooling is a good thing.
The bit about it being free for locals was a concession to the reality that if one state offered free tuition to all comer
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Yeah I know, I moved to CA for the free tuition back in the 90s. Did that work out for CA? Well, I ended up staying for a bunch of years and was paying taxes on $100k a year when I left so I think they at least broke even.
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You probably about $6-7k a year in taxes, plus a significant amount of economic contributions for rent, and other purchases in the state. Someone better than me at this would have to do the math to find the breaking point, but I suspect it doesn't take very long to break even on a student. And not everyone who comes here ends up becoming a student. (although I think the schools are good and the tuition is a good deal, especially at the smaller public colleges here)
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It's not a bad deal to give most immigrants free higher education, assuming there is a high chance they will remain in the country.
Why is this? Because an immigrant of working age is a gift. Some other country paid to feed, cloth, and educate them. And now they are here ready to work. They are ready to transition from primarily a consumer of resources to a net producer. Investing a little more on top to get the most productive workers possible during their prime years is just good business.
This isn't compat
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I know a trans girl who was upset that the younger trans girls had it much easier than they did. They were more than self enough aware to realize that emotion was all kinds of fucked up and wrong but they still couldn't stop themselves from feeling it. It wasn't fair after all.
To be
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Free college sounds great, until you realize that college will be rationed, probably by academic achievement, which would block students from under-performing K-12 schools from entering college. Is that the plan? Or are we going to fill colleges based on racial, gender, or economic factors?
It would not entirely block students from underperforming K-12 schools, because college admissions officials do not solely look at the performance of schools. They also look at things like raw GPA, class rank, classes that are acknowledged as being more challenging, and on other aspects of scholarship like applications essays and standardized tests.
Certainly there would be fewer students from underperforming schools, because there would generally be fewer strong candidates from underperforming schools, t
Notary public sign-off (Score:1)
Have a notary public or school official verify your ID for enrolling.
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ID is racist man.
I don't follow (Score:1)
Please explain.
Re:I don't follow (Score:4, Insightful)
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I read that here as well but in does not apply to this situation. It can be considered "voters suppression" when applied to elderly or illiterate who came unprepared for a single voting day, effectively removing them from the voting pool.
But here we're talking about smart young people who have certainly informed themselves about the college they want to enter and the procedure to do so. Also the timeframe for a registration is several weeks, which leaves them time to request the documents they might not hav
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I read that here as well but in does not apply to this situation. It can be considered "voters suppression" when applied to elderly or illiterate who came unprepared for a single voting day, effectively removing them from the voting pool.
And that's what happened when the conservatives introduced it in the UK... More older, likely conservative voters were turned away.
They wanted voter suppression, they just didn't think it applied to them.
The current government is in no hurry to get rid of it, but that's a different story.
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Ask any democrat.
Education is a subsidy (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's see...
In the 1960s, bureaucrats noticed that people with college degrees earned more money. It's simple, they said. Give everyone a college degree, and we will have eliminated poverty! The voters agreed and approved a wide range of entitlements.
In the 1980s, it was decided that you could not criticize bullshit majors... so political correctness (PC) was instituted lest you point out that the Womens Studies, Black Studies, and Hispanic Studies majors were easy-As for do-nothings.
The government grants,
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Womens Studies, Black Studies, and Hispanic Studies majors were easy-As for do-nothings.
No, they actually weren't. You won't find many football players enrolled in any of those because you actually have to do the work. And they don't have time for school.
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I'm not sure if he's just bashing majors that are no hard sciences, but the point is probably that you don't need that much financial aid when you study something that will make you money as when you do something that hasn't a clear demand. "I am a physicist, do you have work for me?" is easier to answer positive than "I have studied black studies, what can I work". The second is studied out of interest (only) not because there is a demand for people with black studies.
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"I am a physicist, do you have work for me?" is easier to answer positive than "I have studied black studies, what can I work". The second is studied out of interest (only) not because there is a demand for people with black studies.
I am not sure that is true. How many mediocre physicists do we need? On the other hand there (was) plenty of work for people in diverse environments where black studies, women's studies etc would be a useful background. The notion that there is no use for people with an understanding those communities and their history is just wrong.
If you see universities as trade schools, then a lot of undergraduate classes are pretty useless. But you can find a lot better examples than women's studies. . Classical greek
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"How many mediocre physicists do we need?"
Not the worst argument, still they are in demand. CERN won't be looking for them, but there are enough companies that are looking for people who know how to think and have learned basic math. Mediocre physicists may not make groundbreaking discoveries, but they can still be good employees with STEM background.
"On the other hand there (was) plenty of work for people in diverse environments where black studies, women's studies etc would be a useful background."
Is/Was
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The biggest abuse in the number of students versus the number of jobs in the profession are in journalism. There are more journalism students than there are jobs in the entire industry.
Music unfortunately has similar problems even with something that has more value. In far too many cases, graduates from college music programs can't work in the field because their teachers are the ones with seats in the local orchestra. They're literally having to directly compete with their instructors.
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Don't forget football. There are career slots for only a small number of college football players.
Last time I checked, colleges don't offer an actual major in football. It sure as hell may look like they do given how insulated the players may be from the rest of the student body and how so many only meet the bare minimums academically required in order to remain eligible to play, but the on-paper major isn't football.
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Last time I checked, colleges don't offer an actual major in football. It sure as hell may look like they do
There was a quote by someone who said if the football coach is a universities best paid employee, then what you have is a sports franchise with a side gig. They don't give degrees for playing football but you won't find many (any?) NFL football players who didn't go to college whether they ever got a degree or not.
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Unfortunately the collegiate football system is a perfect example of giving them what they want. Alumni and students want football enough that the programs are very popular and thus are competing for coaches and even players. Some college football programs are even directly profitable through ticket sales, merchandise sales, and media licensing.
The reason why all professional football players went to college is because there is no 'farm' system for football players separate from the college system. There
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Some college football programs are even directly profitable through ticket sales, merchandise sales, and media licensing.
I don't think there are many division one college football programs that don't make a lot of money, at least for the coaches. They are sports franchises with a monopoly that allows them to charge large sums of money to advertisers and allows them to spend a pittance on their workforce. And they are "non-profits", so they are taxpayer subsidized even in the rare instance they are private universities.
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Re: Education is a subsidy (Score:3)
Re: Education is a subsidy (Score:2)
How Republicans will "solve" this. (Score:1)
They'll get rid of financial aid, because people don't need an education more than taxpayers need to pay for the well-being of others (except when it's their own tail in a vice, like war).
We need to decide, do we want a society that has pathways for people to lift themselves out of poverty? A society that prevents extreme suffering. Or one that is not empathic and more Darwinist? Are people so fearful and selfish that we can't give up few luxuries to ensure our neighbors can be OK?
If you have to buy a less
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Ideally, federal student loans don't cost anything, because the borrower has to pay it back, with interest, and can't discharge the debit thru bankruptcy... Except, of course, Democrats decided that it was unreasonable to expect people that borrowed tens of thousands of dollars to get an education to pay back their loans. Cancelling those loans cost us hugely, all that debt went right on to the national debt.
Re: How Republicans will "solve" this. (Score:3)
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Re: How Republicans will "solve" this. (Score:2)
Exactly. Blame the 2005 BAPCPA , bankruptcy reform, for creating this problem with private student loans.
This was pushed by GWB, but also supported by Senator Joe Biden at the time. Now the chickens have come to roost.
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If you have to buy a less fancy car, so your neighbor won't starve .. would you do it?
Sign me up. Better yet, sign yourself up: I recently wrote my lawmakers asking them to RAISE my taxes and the taxes of everyone at my income level and higher, to make sure our (USA's) national debt is eventually paid off without making anyone in America starve to death simply because they are poor. I'm inviting you to do the same.
Do I *LIKE* the idea of paying more taxes? No, not at all. But it sure beats having starving neighbors or having the next generation face national bankruptcy.
In the meantime,
Re: How Republicans will "solve" this. (Score:2)
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Why would I want to pay down a 3.3% debt when I can make 10%?
If new borrowing were to cease entirely today (i.e. if the government were running a slightly-in-the-black budget with enough money to pay off debt as it matures), the existing debt would be retired bit by bit as existing debt reaches maturity and are paid off.
If they run a budget that is merely balanced without enough to pay off maturing bonds, they will have to borrow at current interest rates to pay off the maturing bonds.
You do raise an intere
Re: How Republicans will "solve" this. (Score:2)
Even if maturing debt is merely replaced, that still happens at less than long term average market return rates. Why worry about retiring one bond for the next generation if your estate would re
Yet another mistaken made by gov employees (Score:4, Insightful)
U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity
This should have never been an optional thing to begin with. I went to college back in 92 when I first arrived to the US only a year. Not I only I had to show my ID, I had to drag my ass to the FA office dozen times, each time showing my ID, before I was issued the aid check. Who the hell would paid any kind of money to anyone without verifying the recipient identity? That doesn't make any sense!
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Requiring aid is racist, or haven't you heard?
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Requiring aid is racist, or haven't you heard?
You mean ID, right? Yes.
As a serious question, how does one cash a Financial Aid check without ID? How does you open a bank account to have the funds deposited in?
Why do students get actual checks sent to them to pay tuition?
This just seems all kinds of messed-up...
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The govt loaning money for education itself is "messed up", especially when it does not require it to be backed back on terms that will actually pay off the debt, if it requires it to be paid back at all.
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Why do students get actual checks sent to them to pay tuition?
Government loans (up to a per-semester maximum) can cover tuition, books, and the cost of living. Remember, most full-time students are either working part-time McJobs or aren't working any paid job at all, and they still have to pay rent (dorm or otherwise), eat, and pay other living expenses.
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Who the hell would paid any kind of money to anyone without verifying the recipient identity?
A college financial aid office that took the student's tuition out of the check. Higher education is a business. They don't really care who is paying the bill as long as they can collect.
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Hey. They're "working from home".
Like the dweebs that used to call me at work and ask me to do their job in the plant because it was "their working from home day".
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Not I only I had to show my ID, I had to drag my ass to the FA office dozen times, each time showing my ID, before I was issued the aid check.
Online-only classes weren't a thing in '92, but correspondence classes were. I assume you weren't taking classes by correspondence. If you were, it might have been *possible* to game the system, at least at some schools. But because few if any 4-year schools offered correspondence classes much less an all-correspondence option, it wasn't possible to game the system this way "at scale" back then.
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This is closely related to what I said when we discussed this last time: When I went to college, I was required to apply for financial aid, which means doing the FAFSA. This pushes ID verification off onto the federal government.
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U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity
This should have never been an optional thing to begin with. I went to college back in 92 when I first arrived to the US only a year. Not I only I had to show my ID, I had to drag my ass to the FA office dozen times, each time showing my ID, before I was issued the aid check. Who the hell would paid any kind of money to anyone without verifying the recipient identity? That doesn't make any sense!
Exactly.
And lol, no, ceasing to require ID was not a "mistake". It was a deliberate policy.
(And merely wanting to require ID again is supposedly evil fascism ...)
Institutions are victims of identity fraud (Score:3)
In this case it looks like the colleges didn't check people's identities very well knowing that the federal student aid program would eat the cost. This is a moral hazzard. The college's want students paying tuition, they have no incentive to check identities because that would mean turning away someone who is paying. The federal student aid programs likely had no way to physically meet the students so they delegated the work to an unmotivated party, the colleges. The easy fix is to put the colleges on the hook for the faud. They should also be on the hook, at least partially, for students who don't pay back the loans. That would quickly eliminate degrees that don't lead to jobs that pay well enough to pay back the loans. If colleges don't like the deal then they don't need to accept students on federal aid.
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Let's correct this fallacy when someone impersonates you to an institution you are not the victim of identity fraud the instititution is.
I guess you're American and thus everything is true, false, black, white, either, or, red or blue. But your statement is just dumb. Both are victims of identify fraud. Anytime anyone impersonates you you are a victim of fraud regardless of whether you are just experiencing a minor inconvenience or not. The word fraud does not take into account the scale of effect of the fraud.
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18 months ago someone walked into a bank branch 3000km from where I li
A modest proposal (Score:2)
They could solve this problem tomorrow (Score:2)
This level of fraud is ridiculous when anyone with an IQ above 50 could tell them how to solve this problem tommorrow. Namely, require in person interviews for financial aid. Or some similar due diligence. This is not rocket science.
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That's... let's see... approximately 10 million in person interviews. Oh yeah. No problem at all.
https://educationdata.org/fina... [educationdata.org]
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Oops... sorry. 10 million successful recipients. 17 million applicants.
Now, that's fine because I'm sure the current administration will pony up the funding to pay for interviewing those 17 million people for 2025, and then subsequently every year.
"This is not rocket science."
You're right. Rocket science is generally funded.
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It's not whether or not it makes sense. The current administration isn't the slightest bit interested in financial reasonability. It's all about optics. As in 100% consideration for politics and 0% for actual calculable gains or losses.
They would look at this situation and conclude that financial aid for the government should be shut down. Not that it should be corrected by careful expenditures to safeguard it.
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That cost a fraction of the financial aid. And a fraction of the money saved by not issuing aid to fraudulent people (or "people" when it comes to AI bots).
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Stupidly easy to fix (Score:5, Insightful)
If this system didn't involve a reimbursement and instead worked by correcting the fees structure at the source then there would be no reason for criminals to ghost enrol to commit fraud. The only beneficiary of a ghost enrolment would be the university, and they can't exactly just go into hiding after taking the money.
Stealing welfare (Score:3)
Why does the USA fixate on stopping real mothers 'stealing' welfare but not on fake students stealing welfare? Why is government money disbursed to people without a confirmed identity?
Why is the USA so disinterested in stopping identity theft: There's little point having proof-of-identity (KYC) laws when criminals steal names from the very database designed to stop them? There's a real answer to this question: Because those databases empower the government and corporations to do as they please. The big, beautiful database that Palantir is building, will increase their power over the people of the USA.
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Why is government money disbursed to people without a confirmed identity?
That's an interesting question. Let's start with the very beginning. How do you confirm an identity? As you formulate your answer make sure your system: a) is available to all, and b) is completely immune from fraud.
I suspect you will fail to answer this, or at least will think you came up with a solution only for it to get picked apart after it is posted here. The reason I make this statement so confidently is because there are precisely no countries in the world free from fraud, regardless of what identit
What we are not talking about â¦. (Score:1)