65,000 Community College Students in CA are fake

Readers know my business is a PR firm with clients in Internet security; this story popped up recently that 65,00 “enrolled” students at statewide California community colleges are fake.  Add this to poor graduation rates, cancelled classes that prohibit the ability to graduate with an AA after 2 years, and denial from community college board members seeking higher office while being unaware of graduation rates, and I’m not sure what to do with this.

But it’s crap.

On the first day of spring term this year, an aeronautics professor came to administrator Laura Hope to share something suspicious: Most of the students in his virtual class weren’t participating at all.

Hope, the head of instruction at Chaffey College, a community college in Southern California’s Inland Empire, dove into the college’s records to find out why.

The shocking answer? These weren’t real students, but scammers likely out to bilk taxpayers of millions of dollars in financial aid. Faculty and staff caught onto the scam before any dollars went out, Hope said. If they hadn’t, about $1.7 million would have landed in the hands of fraudsters.

Chaffey is not the only California community college to report such a scam, according to a CalMatters investigation. Officials with the 116-college system say they are seeing a spike in cyberattacks since the pandemic, which they suspect is because the scammers are targeting federal COVID-19 relief grants along with traditional financial aid. At least 10 districts or individual colleges have told CalMatters they’ve had increases in fake applications, registrations, financial aid filings, or some combination of the three. The Chancellor’s Office estimates that about 20% of the traffic coming to the system’s online application portal is from bots and other “malicious” actors.

Bots are filling up classes, in some cases preventing real students from enrolling. And identifying and blocking the fake student accounts is taking up considerable staff time, college officials say. They say the system is being targeted partly because it is open enrollment and does not have an application fee.

“It’s a well-orchestrated, analytically led assault on the weaknesses in our system,” Hope said.

This week, the California Student Aid Commission told the Los Angeles Times it had identified more than 65,000 applications for aid from purported community college students that appear to be fake, lending credence to the idea that scammers are seeking to get their hands on state grants.

And in a memo to colleges Monday, the community college system’s vice chancellor for digital innovation and infrastructure, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, announced new security measures to combat the threat.