It’s Halloween season. And ghosts are beginning to appear everywhere… including ghost students.
No, not college co-eds dressed up in their scariest outfits for a night out with friends, but scammers who enroll in college just to defraud your institution (and the student loan system) out of millions.
Yes, millions.
It’s a problem that’s been around for a while now but has recently become more rampant.
Here’s how it works: A fraudster applies for enrollment, digitally, in your school; often using fake or stolen identities; and often without ever having physically spoken to anyone in the enrollment department (this is key to the scam, we’ll get back to this in a moment).
Once they’ve been accepted, the ghost student will actually “enroll” in classes, appearing just like any other student who’s there to learn.
But the purpose here, for the ghost student, is not to learn, they’re not even actually there… Their purpose is to steal.
And this goes for brick-and-mortar schools, as well as fully online. Anywhere a ghost can enroll without ever physically talking to enrollment.
Now, once “enrolled” the ghost may go about committing frauds in various ways. These include accessing college computer systems via their assigned email student addresses to steal data to sell on the dark web…
Or to access your systems to hold data or the systems themselves hostage for ransom, or to simply defraud the federal student loan system outright.
Get this… According to the US Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California back in 2023, “Three women were arrested… on a federal grand jury indictment alleging they ran a federal student aid fraud scheme that used the identities of California prison inmates and other victims to fraudulently enroll in an Orange County-based community college and obtain federal student loans totaling nearly $1 million.”[1]
But today, just two and a half years after that $1 million heist, and with the widespread use of AI, the scammers are getting more prevalent, and their frauds are becoming far more “profitable” for them.
According to an advisory issued by the Department of Education earlier this year, roughly $90 million in student aid was awarded to ineligible students. And a whopping $30 million was traced back to the stolen identities – used for ghost enrollment purposes – of dead people![2]
Jordan Burris, the VP of Identity Verification at Socure, told Fortune magazine that between 20% and 60% of all enrollees at the institutions he counts as clients are, in fact, ghost students.[3]
Now, these frauds cut both ways. For colleges, they’re victimized by enrolling fake students who may never actually “pay” for classes, while taking up to 60% of your seats; and may potentially steal or hold hostage your data…
And for real students, they’re victimized by getting “locked” out of class availability or by being put on waiting lists… and can be victimized by the potential for higher interest rates on the loans they’re taking out.
Artificial intelligence, like we noted earlier, is making the ghost student scam easier than ever. And because of how our federal student loan system is designed, it’s American institutions that are under attack; often from foreign criminal entities.
See, criminal ghost student networks deploy AI bots, thousands at a time, to apply to colleges, enroll in classes, and, of course, apply for student aid; even filling out FAFSA forms.
And because many enrollment departments never actually speak with these ghosts, they go completely unnoticed until, well, the “money is gone.”
So, one way institutions can help avoid ghost students is by actually talking with prospective students before class selections. Yes, we know, if you have 3,000 incoming students, talking with all of them is likely an impossibility.
But what if you could talk with prospective students BEFORE they even enroll?
What if you could verify the fact that they are an actual person, who’s actually interested in going to your school, to actually learn…
Before they have an opportunity to take a seat from a real student, or scam your system?
Well, you can.
How? By having Conversion Media Group on your side. No, we’re not an anti-fraud company. We’re a nationally known company that initiates new student enrollments…
And we specialize in live transfer leads. These are real student prospects we have on the phone that we can transfer directly into your enrollment department the moment they show genuine interest in learning…
They’re real people, with real intent to enroll. And you can talk to them… they’re not ghosts!
Call one of our college enrollment initiative experts at Conversion Media Group at:
1-800-419-3201 and we’ll explain how our programs can work for you.
[1] Central District of California | Three Women Indicted for Alleged Scheme that Used Prison Inmates’ Identities to Fraudulently Obtain Federal Student Loans | United States Department of Justice
[2] U.S. Department of Education Fights Fraud in Student Aid to Protect the American Taxpayer | U.S. Department of Education
[3] ‘Ghost’ students are hijacking millions from colleges—and locking real human students out of classes | Fortune