News Update

California Community Colleges investigate whether fake students are enrolling

The chancellor’s office for California’s community college system is investigating whether fake student bot accounts are enrolling in courses in an attempt to obtain financial aid, the Los Angeles Times first reported.

Valerie Lundy-Wagner, interim vice chancellor of digital innovation and infrastructure for the system, wrote in a memo this week that the system has installed technology to detect bot and fraud activity on its main online application portal. Lundy-Wagner added that about 20% of traffic on that portal has been identified as “malicious and bot-related.”

In a separate statement to EdSource, the chancellor’s office said it is “investigating suspicious activity related to potential college application and financial aid fraud,” adding that some colleges have reported that there may be “bot students” enrolled in active courses.

“We have contacted the Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General. Any financial aid fraud is unacceptable and diverts resources away from deserving students who are seeking to improve their lives through a college education,” the chancellor’s office added.

The memo doesn’t specify which financial aid awards are being targeted, but one possibility is Covid-19 relief money that the colleges are awarding to students. In total, California’s community colleges have about $1.6 billion in federal Covid-19 relief aid that is available to be awarded to students in the form of emergency grants. Some of the funds have already been distributed.

In the memo, Lundy-Wagner also said the system has created a new policy that requires local colleges to confirm whether an application that has been deemed likely to be fraud is from a real student or not within two weeks. If the college doesn’t take action, the application is automatically confirmed as fraud and the account is suspended.

“With this change, it is vital that false positives (i.e., applications marked fraudulent by the SPAM filter that are not fraudulent) are reported promptly … to avoid legitimate student accounts becoming suspended,” Lundy-Wagner said in the memo.

California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who is currently on leave from that role, told the Times that at least six colleges have reported an unusual spike in enrollment applications involving students that could be fake.

“I’m certainly alarmed,” Oakley said. “There’s lots of unscrupulous players right now trying to access and exploit benefits, not unlike what’s happened with unemployment insurance and any number of other benefits that have been made available recently because of the pandemic.”