The California Community Colleges system has launched an investigation into what may be an expansive fraud scheme involving fake “bot” students. Officials suspect scammers may be using fraudulent student accounts to enroll in courses and qualify for financial aid or COVID-19 relief grants.
Faculty at a number of campuses started noticing unusually significant increases in enrollment for online classes last week, the first week of classes for the 2021-2022 school year. Upon closer inspection, officials at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton determined that a number of “pseudo-students” had signed up for courses.
Officials have identified that as much as 20 percent of recent traffic on the system’s online application portal was “malicious and bot-related in origin,” according to a memo issued by interim vice chancellor Valerie Lundy-Wagner obtained by The Los Angeles Times.
California Community College Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said at least six campuses statewide have reported unusual patterns of enrollment applications, possibly filed by fake students. Officials have not yet been able to identify the origin of the application attempts.
“There’s lots of unscrupulous players right now trying to access and exploit benefits,” Oakley told The Times. “Not unlike what’s happened with unemployment insurance and any number of other benefits that have been made available recently because of the pandemic.”
The office of chancellor declined to tell The Times whether financial aid was disbursed to any of the fraudulent accounts but said an investigation was ongoing.
Investigators have not yet zeroed in on what financial aid the scammers behind the bot student accounts may have been after. It is possible both state-funded grants as well as federal COVID-19 emergency relief grants could have been targets. California’s community colleges have received more than $1.6 billion in emergency COVID-19 relief for low-income students since the onset of the pandemic.
Problems associated with fake students and fraudulent enrollment have seen an uptick in recent years, as many U.S. colleges and universities are expanding their slate of online learning opportunities. In 2019, a Newport Beach mother was sentenced to five weeks in prison for paying an accomplice $9,000 to take online classes at Georgetown University, impersonating her son. The accomplice went as far as to spoof real-time video recordings of class time to make it look like the legitimately enrolled student was in attendance.
Schemes to scam aid from institutions of higher learning are hardly a new phenomenon. As early as ten years ago, fraud rings have reportedly targeted distance-learning programs with fake students, aimed at conning institutions and governments out of financial aid.
Rio Salado Community College in Tempe, Arizona discovered one such ring operating on its online-learning platform in 2011. The school helped law-enforcement investigators identify 64 different scammers who were all indicted and convicted of fraud. In some cases, the fraudsters did not even have high school diplomas.
KNX has reached out to both the U.S Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General for comment, and will update this story with additional information as it is received.