- Scammers disguised as thousands of fake students Admission applications are being made for floods across the United States. “Students” are registering as stolen or fabricated, being accepted to the school and then disappearing through financial aid and college students’ email addresses that make fraudsters a veneer of legality.
Dr. Jeannie Kim sleeps on budget and admission challenges. She wakes up and finds her college invaded by a group of Phantom students.
Kim, president of San Diego Canyon College in California, told wealth. “They are taking over our waitlist, they are in our classrooms, as if they were real people, and then our real students say they can’t attend classes.”
She said King quickly worked to introduce an AI company to help protect the university and strengthen its guardrails. Kim said the San Diego Canyon eventually dropped over 10,000 students representing thousands of students who are not real students. By spring 2025, enrollment for ghost students has dropped from 14,000 to less than 3,000 since the beginning of spring.
Ghost Student
In community colleges and universities in the United States, complex criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of “synthetic” or “ghost” students (sometimes among the dead at night) to attack colleges. Tribe is Stop Enter the registration portal by yourself to register and illegally apply for financial assistance. Then the ghost’s students take up seats, provide seats for real students, and even resort to doing homework, just to keep them long enough Siphon million Financial assistance before disappearing.
The scope of the ghost plague is shocking. Jordan Burris, vice president of identity verification company Socure and former chief of staff at the federal CIO’s office, told wealth It has been found that more than half of the courses enrolled in certain schools is illegal. Among Socure’s client base, 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts.
“Imagine a world where 20% of the student population is fraudulent,” Burris said. “That’s the reality of scale.”
In a university, more than 400 different financial aid applications can be traced back to a few recyclable phone numbers. “It’s a valid digital Pyrgest plaguing the school’s admission system,” Burris said.
The plan also proves incredible profitable. According to the Ministry of Education consultDOE analysis shows that about $90 million in aid is sent to unqualified students, and about $30 million is traced back to the deceased, whose identities are used to attend classes. The problem has become so terrible. Announce It found nearly 150,000 suspicious identities in federal student aid forms this month, now need Senior institutions apply for the Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form for free in the capacity of verified first-time applicants.
“Every dollar stolen by a ghost is a dollar denied by a real student trying to change lives,” Burris explained. “This is the allocation of public capital that we can’t really afford.”
Under victory
When sleeping on campus, strikes tend to unfold on quiet nights and explain with surgery precisely, explains Laqwacia Simpkins, CEO of Amsimpkins & Associates. Fraud detection platform It is called safety.
Bryce Pustos, director of administrative systems at Chaffee Community College, recalled the enrollment last fall when faculty reported going to bed, zero students enrolled in classes and woke up looking for a full course and a mile-long waitlist.
Chaffey’s chief technology officer Michael Fink said the attacks took place on a large scale and within minutes. Fink tells wealth.
Simpkins told wealth Scammers have learned to be on academic calendars, holidays, enrollment periods, climaxes or semesters begin or end when employees have been extended or the system is monitored more relaxedly.
“They pushed thousands of records at the same time and overwhelmed the staff,” Simpkins said.
In addition, Simpkins noted that this is what it is for admissions and faculty. They are trained educators who have not tested for fraud. She added that their responsibilities focus on access and ensure that real students can take the courses they need, rather than fake students who regulate fraud and try to deceive their illegal financial interests. This aspect also makes the institution more vulnerable, Simpkins said.
“These people are admissions counselors, they are processing applications and want to be able to accept students and provide equal educational opportunities for all,” she said.
Sadly, John Van Weeren, vice president of higher education at IT consulting firm Voyatek, noted that the professor has dealt with the brutal whiplashes in the attack.
“One of the professors was so excited that their class was full and never 100% occupied and thought they might need to open the second part,” Van Weeren recalled. “When the first week of our work with them was in progress, we found out they weren’t real people.”
Follow FAFSA
Community and technical colleges are seen as low-key fruits in a nightmare Fraud Program It is precisely because of how they are designed to interact with local communities and the public and access to local communities and the public as little as possible. Community colleges usually need to accept each qualified student and there is usually no application fee. Financial aid fraud Not new at allBurris said the fraud ring itself evolved from a pandemic-era cash snap-up and Boogman in his mom’s basement.
“These are accelerated due to the spread of these automation technologies,” he said. “These are organized crime businesses – raging rings, they all come from within the United States and internationally.”
Maurice Simpkins, president and co-founder of Amsimpkins, said he has identified international fraud rings in Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nairobi, Kenya, which have repeatedly targeted American universities.
Mike McCandless, vice president of student services at Mercedes College, said the attack was particularly zero in the course. He said social sciences and online-only classes allow as many credits or units as possible to choose from a large number of students.
During the spring semester, Merced initiated half of the fraudulent 15,000 initial registrations. In the next batch of about 7,500 times, about 20% were caught and removed from the classroom, providing space for real students.
Human cost
In addition to financial theft, the pandemic for ghost students has also caused real students to be locked out of the courses they need to graduate. Often, students have planned work or parenting schedules for the courses they intend to attend and are locked into a series of obstacles.
“When you have fraudulent people sitting down in class, you have actual students who need to take classes that aren’t right now, and that’s a barrier,” Pustos said.
However, the program continues to evolve, however, the problem is even more explosive by the algorithms used by schools to detect ghost students and prevent them from applying for financial aid. Several school officials and cybersecurity experts were interviewed wealth Concerned about further iterations of the program, he would not disclose current signs of ghost students.
Over the past 18 months, schools have blocked thousands of robot applicants because they originate from the same email address. There are hundreds of similar emails with singular differences, or instant phone numbers and email addresses are created before applying for registration.
Maurice Simpkins noted that the use of the stolen identity in the United States has increased this year as more schools engage in battle with fraud rings. He has seen college graduates with stolen identities re-enter, or have had their former educational email address to recruit another institution.
Simpkins said the scammers also used quirky short-term and one-time email addresses to register for classes in 10 minutes before using .EDU email addresses. Simpkins explained that the verified email address is “like a gold bar.” The fraudster then appears to be legal and qualifies for student discounts on hardware, software, and can use the university’s cloud storage.
“We had a school contacting us because some fraudsters ordered some computers, equipment, and other materials and then delivered them overseas,” Simpkins said. “They did this using the account of the school’s .edu email address.”
McCanders said it was easy to initially determine whether fake students were being disguised as local applicants because their IP addresses were generated overseas. But only a few semesters, the IP address is local. When the college’s tech team looks deeper, they find that the address comes from an abandoned building or somewhere in the middle of Lake Merced.
McCandless said that whenever the school does something to lock in fraud applicants, the scammers learn and adjust. Now, the school’s system is designed to block ghost applicants directly at the door and multiple stages before they can start attending the classroom.
McCandless said the professor is assigning student assignments to the first day of the course, but ghost students are completing tasks with AI. However, teachers have noticed that half of the classes have handed over the same job or tested the use of Chatgpt, thus seizing false homework.
“They are very innovative and very good at their work,” McCanders said. “I just think they continue to learn and improve consistency – it’s a multi-million dollar plan, there’s money, why don’t you invest?”
‘Rampant‘
DOE believes that financial fraud rates through the stolen identity reached a “Hidden Federal Student Aid Program, which endangers federal student aid programs Higher Education Law. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement that the new interim fix will help prevent identity theft fraud.
“We have a responsibility to act when rampant fraud assists from qualified students, disrupts the operations of universities and deprives taxpayers,” McMahon said.
Ultimately, what schools are trying to do is pose a barrier, which makes scam attacks unattractive because they have to do more front-end work to make fraud plans efficient. However, schools are trying to balance the subtle issues of accepting everyone’s eligibility and staying vulnerable or undocumented students. “The more obstacles you encounter, the more you will affect students, and are usually the ones that students need the most.”
Dr. King from San Diego Canyon College is concerned that too many measures to root fraud may make it more difficult for students and community members (for various reasons, they may have new emails, phone numbers or addresses – without access to education and other resources to help them improve their lives.
“Our ability to provide democratic education that would otherwise not be available is threatened, and this is endangering danger because these bad actors turn our system into their own piglet bank,” Kim said. “We have to continue figuring out how to exclude them so that students can have those legal seats and maintain open access.”
This story was originally fortune.com
