'Ghost students' stealing millions in financial aid from CA community colleges, investigation finds

"SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- We are losing millions of tax dollars right now to what are known as "ghost students" -- online scammers who enroll in community colleges and get away with financial aid meant for actual students from the Bay Area. I-Team reporter Dan Noyes worked on a joint investigation with ABC News. These ghost student scammers mainly come from overseas, and they are a problem throughout California and across the country. They often use artificial intelligence to expand their reach and evade fraud detection controls."

""We would have courses where we'd have 50 seats and another 100+ on a waiting list," San Jose-Evergreen Community College District Chancellor Dr. Beatriz Chaidez told the I-Team. "And we would find that maybe six of those actual enrollees were students and the rest were fraudulent accounts, ghost students." Chaidez said she's seen the most fraud in asynchronous courses in which students can work online at their own speed, but also with in-person classes."

"Murat Mayor, 58, is a business analyst with a PhD.; he has no interest in attending community college. But as he began applying for financial aid for his teenage son, he discovered that scammers had stolen both their identities, signing the father and son up for community college classes across the country. Mayor said, "We noticed that there were a lot of activity. There are a lot of applications, loan applications, grant applications. Then we panicked.""

Millions of tax dollars are being lost to "ghost students"—online scammers who enroll in community colleges and obtain financial aid meant for real students. The scammers mainly operate from overseas and often use artificial intelligence to scale operations and evade fraud detection. Admissions staff at San Jose community colleges are stretched thin trying to identify accounts created with stolen or fake identities. Fraud has created inflated enrollment counts, long waiting lists, and emptied legitimate course seats. Cases include stolen identities used to submit multiple loan and grant applications. In 2024, California Community Colleges reported that 31.4% of applications across 116 colleges were fraudulent.

Read at ABC7 San Francisco