“We’re at such a level where we’re just trying to survive.”

What do you get when you make community college access easier? This hellscape of massive endless fraud.

California’s community colleges are reporting a rise in financial aid fraud. In January, suspected bots represented 1 in 4 college applicants. Schools have given away millions to these scams, and college officials say fraudsters are getting smarter with the help of AI.

1 in 4. The sheer scope of this is massive.

The reports show that between September 2021 and January 2024, the colleges received roughly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid.

Entire classes are filling up with fake students.

“If I saw, for example, that a college that only gets 1,000 applications in some time frame gets 5,000, you kind of know something is probably up,” said Valerie Lundy-Wagner, a vice chancellor for the community college system.

Online classes that historically don’t fill up were suddenly overwhelmed with students — a sign that many of them might be fake — Coston said. Administrators at other large districts, including the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, the Mt. San Antonio Community College District in Walnut, California and the Los Angeles Community College District, told CalMatters that fraudsters are evading each new cybersecurity strategy.

The reason for the reported increase in fraud is because the chancellor’s office and college administrators are getting better at detecting it, he said. Since 2022, the state has allocated more than $125 million for fraud detection, cybersecurity and other changes in the online application process at community colleges.

9 figures are now being spent just in an attempt to fight fraud.

Barajas said faculty at East Los Angeles College are so overwhelmed by bots they haven’t discussed the potential risk to their intellectual property: “We’re at such a level where we’re just trying to survive.”

None of this has to be happening.

Remember, COVID mainstreamed Zoom classes which means that students don’t have to show up to class and often don’t even have to turn on their cameras.

The simple solution would be to bring back in-person classes. And not to hand out any kind of money to individuals but to institutions. But COVID turned us into the world’s suckers. The amount of money foreign fraudsters have been stealing from every single COVID relief program is mindboggling. The message is out to the rest of the world to come rip us off. And they don’t even have to come here. They can do it online.

In Sacramento, community colleges started seeing an influx of applications from Russia, China, and India during the start of the pandemic

And, much like open borders, now that the rest of the world knows how easy it is to rip us off, they’re not letting up.

Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield