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'Ghost' Students are Enrolling in US Colleges Just to Steal Financial Aid (apnews.com) 85

Posted by EditorDavid from the school-spirits dept.
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."

'Ghost' Students are Enrolling in US Colleges Just to Steal Financial Aid More | Reply

'Ghost' Students are Enrolling in US Colleges Just to Steal Financial Aid

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      So can I post ghost my joke again?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by atheos ( 192468 )
      whew, the problem must have been resolved then. I'm so relieved!

    • Not a duplicate (Score:5, Informative)

      by EditorDavid ( 4512125 ) Works for Slashdot on Saturday June 14, 2025 @09:43PM (#65450063)
      Both these stories came out this week... Probably because of the new announcement last week that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs [ed.gov]."

      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...

    • Updated since then. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday June 14, 2025 @09:47PM (#65450065)

      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:4, Insightful)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Saturday June 14, 2025 @08:09PM (#65449959)

    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.

  • almost impossible to stop (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Saturday June 14, 2025 @08:21PM (#65449969) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • "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".

      • 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)

        • 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

          • 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.

    • It's amazing how many problems our civilization has because we can't let things go that we no longer have any use for. Not even the name of tradition just that's how it was when I was a kid so that's how it has to be now.

      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

  • Have a notary public or school official verify your ID for enrolling.

    • ID is racist man.

      • Please explain.

        • Asking for ID for voting is frequently touted as racist voter suppression.

          • 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

        • Ask any democrat.

  • 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,

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        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.

    • You should look up some data about degrees actually conferred. No more than 3 percent of all degrees are in the category of ANY ethnic, racial, or other group study. And that'd also include American Studies majors, which most people worried about alleged "bullshit degrees" generally don't think is bullshit.

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      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.

      • I think you misidentify the problem. Ideally, federal student loans would cost nothing, because they would be relatively easy to pay back... Except, of course, Republicans decided that it was unreasonable for the government NOT to make money on the people that pay their loans. (The markup can be as high as 4.6 percent above the government's cost of money- there are mortgages out there with total effective rates at half that markup. To say nothing of the 4.2 percent disbursement fee they'll never even give y
      • the problem with that system is they took all the risk away from lenders. making cost go threw the roof.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      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,

      • Surely the macroeconomic situation is more relevant than mere national debt and taxes, right? I realize we're not borrowing at 3.3% right now, but that's the average interest rate on the national debt. The only reason *not* to leave more of my money in my hands and tax me *more* on it later is if you've already crashed the economy semi-permanently. Why would I want to pay down a 3.3% debt when I can make 10%?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by davidwr ( 791652 )

          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

          • First, they don't need to look closely at squat. The only viable government "investment" is large-scale public works, and they should be structured so that any return is broad, private, and generally not financializable. Otherwise you're headed straight for planned economy where humans have a miserable track record.

            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)

    by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Saturday June 14, 2025 @10:35PM (#65450099)

    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!

    • Requiring aid is racist, or haven't you heard?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        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...

        • 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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by davidwr ( 791652 )

          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.

    • 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.

    • 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".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      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.

    • 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.

    • 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 ...)

  • Let's correct this fallacy when someone impersonates you to an institution you are not the victim of identity fraud the instititution is. You are should only be merely inconvinienced. And f@#K the banks or who ever who ask you to jump through hoops to fix their mistake. It is up the institutions to ensure that they gave the aid/loan/whatever to the correct individual.

    In this case it looks like the colleges didn't check people's identities very well knowing that the federal student aid program would ea

    • 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.

      • To be a victim of fraud you would have to have been lied to or decieved and been deprived of something. If someone pretends to be you and an institution doesn't validate that they are really talking to you then the institution has been decieved. Saying you are the victim allows the instituition to pass the blame and inconvinience on you for their mistake. It is an excuse for the institutions to not pay you for inconviniencing them.

        18 months ago someone walked into a bank branch 3000km from where I li
  • Punish them with death by ghost guns.

  • 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.

    • That's... let's see... approximately 10 million in person interviews. Oh yeah. No problem at all.

      https://educationdata.org/fina... [educationdata.org]

      • 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.

        • Why not? If it costs $20 for each student to be personally interview to verify their ID (similar function as a public notary), that's very little compared to the cost of fraud at the level described here. I'll tell you what, if the government pays me half of what they say they are being defrauded for, I'll pay for the identifications myself - no cost to the government, as long as the government pays me half of the difference between what they claim they are losing to ghost students today vs. what when I'm p

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        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).

    • Not a problem it's a feature. There huge numbers benefiting from fraud in one way or another, possibly the majority of the population.

  • Stupidly easy to fix (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday June 15, 2025 @02:23AM (#65450303)

    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)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Sunday June 15, 2025 @03:35AM (#65450363)

    ... show colleges a government-issued ID ...

    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.

    • 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

  • decades ago DEI students, and some regular financial aid students, were abusing financial assistance and “free housing” at dorms with no intention of ever going to class. Some colleges let them do it for multiple semesters or even indefinitely.

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