[HN Gopher] Ghost students are creating problems for California ...
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Ghost students are creating problems for California colleges
Author : jakemontero24
Score : 152 points
Date : 2025-05-07 16:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sfgate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sfgate.com)
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| This problem feels like the scalping problem with concert
| tickets. Make the person enrolled show up with valid ID at a
| registration event after classes start. Have a few options for
| when to attend and verify in person.
|
| This would root out all fraud and feels relatively low barrier
| for a community college student who would presumably be in the
| community.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I don't think you even need to go that far -- the problem seems
| to be on the side of the verification of financial aid being
| too lenient, right? How is that vetting breaking down? The
| typical financial aid forms and process is a pain in the neck.
| Money people usually require all sorts of documentation before
| they actually send you money.
| dmurray wrote:
| Increasing the amount of documentation disproportionately
| hurts real students (or real social welfare claimants, etc).
| The scammers can figure out getting the fake documentation
| once and then scale the process - that's literally their
| business.
|
| To deter scammers without the real applicants paying for it,
| you need quality, not quantity: proof of identity that is
| harder to fake.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| people who are most familiar with what exactly is needed to
| pass, are the administrators themselves. This is a
| corruption problem coupled with automation. source:
| california resident
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Corruption? You think the administrators themselves are
| doing it?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no doubt the readers here are very clever, but also
| sometimes lazy in their questions.
|
| Take a look at how real financial crime is done.. the
| ones that know what they are doing, not the amateurs.
| Obviously the first item in a plan is "what is the cost
| of being caught" and quickly, "how can I get this to
| happen without doing it myself and getting caught" .. so
| it is a cooperative agreement, to be corrupt. The most
| successful of the corrupt never do any illegal things at
| all, they simply look the other way. Next is finding
| someone desperate, or far away, to "do the crime" but the
| successful person is involved somehow, in the most
| distant way possible.
|
| Do I really have to type this out? I am guessing anyway.
| Did I say "the admins are making fraud things at night?"
| no. They _mostly_ do not, but that does not make them not
| involved. Read what I wrote, that is what I meant to say
| here.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I like to see if people are willing to be explicit with
| silly claims, instead of hovering at plausibly deniable
| vagueness. I agree that you were intending to say
| something plausibly deniably vague, as you did.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You could hire a company or staff a team that meets people
| where they are to do ID verification in person. This is
| essentially how buying a house works with title companies.
| You can go to the title company or they can come to you for
| a fee.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Probably. But I suspect for the average person community
| college is trying to help, more documentation is more onerous
| and actually harder to get right. Instead an in person
| verification would be less costly for them to engage in and
| more understandable.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Kind of defeats the purpose of online classes. Some of the
| students could be many hours from campus.
|
| Either way, this shouldn't get as far as it does. You can't
| just sign up for a class and expect financial aid - there are
| forms to submit (usually prior to enrollment) to verify ID,
| income, parental income, veteran status, and a whole host of
| other factors that impact the FA award amounts and whether that
| FA is a grant (often federal) or a loan (sometimes gov-backed,
| sometimes not).
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| This is for community college though which I believe only
| allows access to the local community and provides aid to that
| sub group.
|
| Also I disagree with the premise of online classes not
| requiring some portion of enrollment being in person. The two
| can be compatible and probably drops this to zero.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| I don't understand what the actual fraud is. Yes, fake AI bots
| are posing as real students to get financial aid, but this is
| ultimately paid to the school, not pocketed by the "student".
| What am I missing?
| tiahura wrote:
| Excess financial aid is pocketed by the student.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Which are loans. All this fraud to get a relatively small
| amount of money per fake student in the form of loans?
| aoki wrote:
| Pell grants
| braingravy wrote:
| Financial aid is given for cost of living, books, equipment,
| etc. Not just to pay tuition.
|
| Additionally, tuition aid isn't given directly to school: It
| goes to the student, who pays the school.
| tiahura wrote:
| Pell, direct, plus all go directly to the school.
| o11c wrote:
| And a fairly common refrain I've heard was "I can't afford
| another semester of college because all my financial aid
| only applies to tuition."
|
| It was always a huge relief to a student if they managed to
| get a scholarship in cash.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I attended Community College exclusively on Pell Grants. My
| tuition was paid directly to the school. But we received a
| "textbook advance" of funds directly to our personal
| accounts, and whatever funds we didn't use for tuition
| could be used for any educational expense. Furthermore, I
| worked through the Honors program for additional
| scholarship money, and so there was more to be gained
| beyond covering basic tuition and textbooks. (Many classes
| used no textbooks at all, or free resources, so this was a
| pretty good deal.)
|
| I had enough surplus to pay for a good APC UPS system as
| well as a 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad notebook. These were
| invaluable for my education, but they served me for years
| afterwards, personally as well as for employment.
| nine_k wrote:
| EBT cards exist for reasons like that. Issue a card with
| which you can pay for food, books, specific kinds of
| equipment, very much like many corporations give employees
| cards that are locked to particular classes of merchants.
| Limit the amount that can be spent on tangible goods; say,
| 80% should go to tuition. None can be transferred to cash
| accounts.
|
| Maybe this would still allow some fraud, but much, much less
| profitable.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| EBT was about reducing stigma and resale of food stamps and
| WIC. Even that was pretty limited -- the amount of money
| skimmed for ATM fees from cash benefits exceeds fraud
| losses historically.
|
| Same here. Creating some expensive and complex system that
| fights "fraud" that consists of people taking on lifetime
| debt is dumb. Make the services share the pain for bad
| underwriting and the problem goes away instantly.
| imtringued wrote:
| Exactly, fraud is the cost of carelessness. I.e. you're
| paying the fraudsters to leave you alone.
| ourmandave wrote:
| The person pretending to be a student will actually turn in
| home work and attend virtually until the balance of the loan
| and/or grants are deposited into their bank account.
|
| It's legit to have extra funds to pay for education related
| expenses.
| leereeves wrote:
| The article says they don't show up at all:
|
| _" Pugh said she'd normally drop three to five from her
| roster who don't start the course or make contact with her at
| the start of the semester. But during the current spring
| semester, Pugh said that number more than doubled when she
| had to cut 11 students"_
| snapetom wrote:
| That seems like a bad scam that carries a lot of risk vs. low
| reward. These are community colleges. It's not like tuition
| is 30k a semester. Then you have to have a bank account to
| deposit the funds, which can trace you back. The article
| states fraud was $10 million last year. That's not a lot.
|
| I don't know. If _I_ were a criminal I 'd look for something
| that pays out more if I'm going to expose myself.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Remember many people doing this stuff are stupid.
|
| I had a high school friend use student loans to buy a car
| and rent a shithole apartment at 19. He's probably still
| paying for that Toyota Camry now.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Sounds like these programs distributing aid are doing a poor
| job of verifying who's actually getting this money.
|
| Surely this can't be completely anomalous? Certainly it's
| happened before where someone enrolls, receives financial
| aid, and then for any number of reason stops attending
| school? What happens then?
|
| Or was that always a loss and now it's just easy to automate
| that scenario maliciously?
| nine_k wrote:
| > _balance of the loan and /or grants are deposited into
| their bank account._
|
| Here's where the system is defective. The loan's balance
| should go directly to the college's bank account, as a
| tuition payment.
|
| Suddenly, there'd be no incentive to cheat the system, while
| actual students who need help paying for tuition would have
| their tuition paid.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The aid is for more than just tuition, they often give you
| enough to live on.
| ars wrote:
| This long article kept saying the bots were stealing financial
| aid, and yet never once explained how that worked.
|
| Doesn't financial aid go to the school, not the student?
| chneu wrote:
| It depends on the aid.
|
| Federal grants such as Pell are dispursed to the university
| which then sends any excess to the student.
|
| Loans, which comes in a variety of forms, are dispursed to the
| student and then the student pays the university.
|
| This can vary depending on the grant, loan servicer, etc.
| massysett wrote:
| No, federal student loans are also disbursed straight to the
| school, with the school remitting any excess to the student.
| csm_csu_student wrote:
| I'm a current student at CSM and will be attending SFSU next
| semester after initially dropping out and working in tech for a
| decade. So I have some exposure to this and regularly discuss the
| topic with faculty and participate in remote courses where this
| phenomena is most likely to occur. While CSM is not City College,
| I think its a fair comparison.
|
| I really think this problem is being overblown and I am concerned
| politicians, voters, faculty, and students, will be negatively
| impacted by this kind of click bait journalism.
|
| This article sucks.
|
| > These "ghost students" are artificially intelligent agents or
| bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of
| dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual
| humans.
|
| This claim is completely unsubstantiated. It links to a generic
| and unrelated SF Gate article. As technologists this claim is
| plausible given the current state of AI technology, but can we
| please provide evidence - is it the interviewed teacher making
| this claim or the SF Gate writer? Are there other sources
| substantiating this claim?
|
| > A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges
| Chancellor's Office directed SFGATE to a Public Records Request
| Act request to obtain the exact numbers. However, the office
| estimates that 0.21% of the system's financial aid was
| fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said.
|
| 0.21% estimate of Community College disbursements. Not UC
| disbursements or CSU disbursements. Notice no monetary amount is
| mentioned.
|
| ---
|
| There are real issues with "flighty" students who don't engage
| with the material, prolific AI use for many if not most
| assignments, and some really broken incentives.
|
| There is also amazing free education for almost all income
| groups. Hard working students who have study groups and engage
| with faculty and eschew the use of AI because it detracts
| significantly from their education.
|
| Happy to answer any questions about my experience over the past
| year completing an Associate Degree for Transfer - it is an
| excellent opportunity for California residents and I encourage
| folks of all backgrounds and age groups to explore the services
| they offer.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Calmatters [1] reported ($10 million) in fraud from community
| colleges in 2024, that's my bad in my haste to post a response I
| missed this point.
|
| [1]: https://calmatters.org/education/higher-
| education/2025/04/fi...
| SirFatty wrote:
| Sounds like something a ghost student would say.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it is predictable to attack the student point of view, agree
| there. What is also predictable is that casual, drive-by
| "concerned voters" who are typically decades past their own
| lean years in school, and care more about paying their own
| taxes than concern for young adults. The fraud here is
| connected to the administrators of the financial aid! They
| "slow walk" investigations (guess) since they are paid by the
| number of students who are active, and those numbers
| plummeted during Covid-19 and b) they are financially
| connected to the flow of money they look after. Community
| colleges are wildly varying in rigor and skill of
| administering. The whole political cover here is that casual
| observers (who might vote) quickly place blame on students or
| "distant others" .. How many mid-level accountants are owning
| vacation homes with extra money while students actually
| starve in high cost of living California? etc
| aoki wrote:
| IIRC to collect Pell you have to be enrolled past the
| withdrawal deadline. The CCs are keeping the disbursement fraud
| rate low by filtering initial admissions (they are estimating
| >30% fraudulent applications) and then kicking out bots before
| disbursement. The point of these articles is that this is
| costly: CCC admin has to spend >$100M on IT on the admissions
| end, the faculty have to police their online courses in a way
| that is really uncomfortable (false positives mean you kick out
| a real student), and even unsuccessful bots take up seats that
| then go unused once you pass the add deadline. The CCs need
| reform of the disbursement process or these costs will keep
| getting higher.
| autoexec wrote:
| It seems like they're attacking the wrong end of the problem by
| trying to detect fake students in the classrooms. If the issue is
| that people are signing up for financial aid and then
| disappearing with the cash they'd be better off making sure that
| the people who get financial aid actually are who they say they
| are before sending them money, or better yet stop giving cash as
| financial aid and instead give some type of credit that can only
| be spent on/at the school.
|
| Once scammers can't get access to the money the problem of bots
| in the classroom will mostly go away.
| leereeves wrote:
| I agree, it sounds like the problem is in the way financial aid
| is granted.
|
| Is this (as the headline suggests) more of a problem in
| California? Does California have particularly generous and
| vulnerable financial aid?
| gedy wrote:
| California does give financial aid to undocumented/illegal
| immigrants, so verification can be difficult and touchy
| subject:
|
| https://www.csac.ca.gov/college-financial-aid-and-safety-
| for...
| Aeolun wrote:
| Shouldn't the process of getting that financial aid make
| them registered?
| int_19h wrote:
| If they truly don't have any means to verify that the
| person receiving the grant is who they think it is, this
| sounds broken by design.
| ac29 wrote:
| I only clicked through the first few steps of the process
| but it appears to require government issued ID.
| hedora wrote:
| You don't need to be in the country legally to get a
| California driver's license.
|
| https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-
| identification...
|
| Similarly, there are mechanisms that allow victims of
| crimes to seek help from the police without fear of
| deportation.
|
| Makes sense to me. I'm much more worried about road
| safety and crime than people coming to the US then paying
| payroll and sales taxes, but not being able to claim
| federal benefits.
| int_19h wrote:
| Which is to say, they are "undocumented" on federal level
| but not on state level.
|
| Which is well and good, but then the original question
| still applies: how do the bots manage to get past all
| these requirements?
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Say that in certain political circles and you're liable
| to get berated
| int_19h wrote:
| People in those circles generally believe that college
| education should just be free for all residents. Which is
| an internally consistent position, since if everyone is
| eligible, there's no need for verification. It's
| specifically the programs that restrict eligibility that
| don't make sense if you can't verify said eligibility
| (which starts with verifying identity).
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yeah, this confused me as well...
|
| Are these bots successfully completing FAFSA forms to the
| government?
|
| And the government is successfully generating ISIRs to send to
| the schools?
|
| If yes, then this is a federal ID verification issue.
|
| If not, why are the schools sending aid payments sand ISIR? Or
| does CA run its own state-level aid programs that skip the
| federal forms completely (and botching the ID verification on
| their own)?
|
| Or are all of these effectively stolen IDs? Where the FAFSA and
| ISIR are for real people (but people who aren't actually
| students)?
|
| The article is missing a LOT of details, what a waste of time.
| shusaku wrote:
| Identity theft is relatively common, so I'm not sure if their
| aid system should be considerable especially vulnerable or
| not.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We need a better phrase, like "impersonation fraud" or
| something, which focuses on the two parties actually
| involved. You can't actually steal somebody's identity of
| course, they are just an uninvolved third party.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, I'd say it's a bit more complicated than that.
|
| Quite often the impersonator had nothing to do with the
| collection of the identity itself. There are people that
| 'copy' things like insecure online information around
| identity, but there are also people that physically steal
| things like drivers licenses and birth certificates. This
| is the stage of a crime that I'd consider actual identity
| theft. After that you have black market information
| brokers. They didn't capture the identities in the first
| place. They don't directly use the information to
| impersonate others and yet they are still complicit in a
| crime. Then you have the final stage of impersonation
| fraud as you state.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I want to be pedantic, it is not the identity they've
| stolen in the first case, but the documentation of the
| identity. A person's identity is just intrinsically part
| of the person.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >A person's identity is just intrinsically part of the
| person.
|
| Is it?
|
| If I look at least somewhat like you, grab your ID, and
| stuff you in an incinerator then any ID system that does
| not take detailed biometrics will have no clue if I'm you
| or not.
|
| Saying identity is intrinsic is tantamount to saying "I
| am that I am". I mean, that's cool and all, but that
| tells me nothing about who you actually are.
|
| There is nothing intrinsic about your name for example.
| This can and does change for people.
|
| Again, same with location where you live.
|
| We spend our entire lives grown up and getting old, so
| how we look adapts.
|
| Then you get down to bio markers like fingerprints or
| dna, but these are recent inventions when it comes to
| human identification and take a fair bit of technology to
| use successfully.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's no such thing as identity theft, it's all bank
| fraud or in this case student aid fraud. "Identity theft"
| is a term coined by banks to try to make it sound like
| random people should have to deal with the fallout of the
| banks' bad identity verification practices.
|
| If the student aid system verifies identity by, for
| example, just validating that the applicants know a single
| 9-digit number that after the Equifax breach should be
| considered public information, that is a critical problem
| with their identity verification system and it should be
| patched.
| tacass wrote:
| I've long wondered why victims of this fraud don't more
| often sue the institutions that granted fraudulent
| accounts, for any and all damages and cost incurred.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Read Ross Anderson book Security Eng., it deals a lot
| with these types of issues. In short, banks try not do
| anything about as long they do not have to pay for it.
|
| I suspect the issue is similar here with the multi
| stakeholder problem here. The college needs as many
| paying students as possible, the workload of the staff
| should be as low as possible, the office giving out loans
| wants to have a low workload... All in all good scammers
| will serve all these needs and happily take the money in
| the process.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Well, you've come to the right place.
|
| When someone tricks a bank in a way that harms you, the
| legal question governing your recovery from the bank is,
| "Did the bank act negligently, and did that negligence
| cause you harm?"
|
| Unlike normal life, where "negligent" means "I didn't
| enjoy it," under the law there are several required
| elements that constitute negligence. One required element
| of negligence is that for a party's negligence create
| liability, the alleged negligent party must have owed the
| harmed party a duty at the time of the breach of that
| duty.
|
| Duty can arise in several ways according to state common
| and statutory law. For example, a doctor owes the duty of
| the standard of care to his patient. A driver owes the
| duty to drive the speed limit to other motorists. The
| question of whether duty exists in any situation is a
| complex question of law.
|
| One thing that isn't complicated, though: in every
| jurisdiction I've researched, a bank owes no duty to a
| non-customer.
|
| This is why victims of identity fraud don't sue the bank
| that granted fraudulent accounts: there is no negligence
| and will this be no recovery. (With the caveat that I've
| seen people who were harmed by a bank where they randomly
| happened to have an account... in this circumstance, duty
| can be ascribed to the bank because a banker-customer
| relationship in which duty is rooted exists).
|
| Corollary: open an account at every major bank to
| establish a duty-relationship everywhere.
|
| Poor startup idea of the day: Accounts-at-every-bank-as-
| a-Service.
| nullc wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E Relevant
| Mitchell & Webb.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| Haha, I'd never heard this. I liked their TV show I
| should check out the radio stuff.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > "Identity theft" is a term coined by banks to try to
| make it sound like random people should have to deal with
| the fallout of the banks' bad identity verification
| practices.
|
| Wow, great point. I admit: I have been tricked by
| financial institutions to believe this term! Another (US
| military) term that is similarly misleading to me:
| "surgical strike". If they blow up the bus stop in your
| neighborhood with a cruise missile fired from 300km
| away... well, you won't ever feel safe in that
| neighborhood again... so the strike is certainly less
| than "surgical".
| AndrewDavis wrote:
| Classic Mitchell and Webb skit
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
| dani__german wrote:
| surgical in this sense means only blowing up the bus stop
| instead of leveling 6 blocks with a MOAB. Your feelings
| about safety are supposed to be negatively affected by a
| bomb. Whether that bomb is a precise or strategic bomb is
| immaterial.
| hedora wrote:
| In places like Gaza, "surgical strike" often means "only"
| blowing up the support pillar of an occupied multi-story
| apartment complex in the middle of the night.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > "Identity theft" is a term coined by banks to try to
| make it sound like random people should have to deal with
| the fallout of the banks' bad identity verification
| practices.
|
| The problem isn't the banks, the problem is that unlike
| Europe where in most countries it's commonplace for
| everyone to have a government-issued ID document, the US
| does not have that requirement and so companies of all
| sorts abuse documents not meant for that purpose like
| SSNs or driver licenses that can be trivially forged.
|
| Banks can't invent security out of thin air when a
| significant part of the US population believes that
| mandating possession of one is a surefire way into a
| dictatorship or whatnot.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| About 3% of the us adult population doesn't have
| government issued photo id. So if the issue is forgery
| say so, it's not a lack of id or a cultural norm against
| it.
| username332211 wrote:
| How many billions would a major bank loose in a lawsuit,
| if they did the sensible thing and refused to deal with
| 3% of the population?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| 4.2% of US _households_ are unbanked. Banks refuse
| customers for many less extreme reasons than "can't
| verify identity" which is in fact a requirement for them
| with all of their federal and state regulators.
| trelane wrote:
| Most do.
|
| For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Banking/comments/1c
| sl00q/any_banks_...
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >How many billions would a major bank loose in a lawsuit,
| if they did the sensible thing and refused to deal with
| 3% of the population?
|
| Zero. Because FINCEN/KYC[0] laws in the US _mandate_
| identification for all customers.
|
| Which means that at least 3% of the populations is
| "unbanked"[1]: Some reasons a person
| might not have a bank account include:
| Lack of access via a nearby bank branch or mobile phone
| Minimum balance fees Distrust of the banking
| system, typically due to lack of transparency
| regarding fees and deposit timing[1] No
| access to government-issued ID, which is required to open
| a bank account To avoid delinquent debts,
| such as creditors seizing the account in
| judgements, or the government collecting back taxes or
| child support
|
| [0]
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/knowyourclient.asp
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked
|
| Edit: Fixed subject/verb agreement (laws/mandate)/fixed
| quote formatting.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > About 3% of the us adult population doesn't have
| government issued photo id.
|
| Add on top of that undocumented people or the issues
| surrounding the Native American population and their
| partial autonomy rights, and it becomes a mess very very
| quickly because it won't stay at "about three percent".
| nullc wrote:
| What? US banks won't bank you if you don't have 27
| distinct forms of government ID and a recent rectal exam.
|
| And then they have someone with an incomprehensible
| accent in a call center that probably also runs scam
| calls calling you up and asking for your password as part
| of their ordinary SOP.
|
| They deploy fancy new tech like "verifying your voice"
| with some AI crap while simultaneously not allowing your
| password to have more than 8 characters. (Which must have
| two symbols but if one of them is ` you'll experience
| random spontaneous logouts).
|
| There may be many causes of the disaster that is bank
| security, people not having ID is absolutely not part of
| it.
| atoav wrote:
| Interestingly enough the US seems to have between 1.5 and 6
| times more of such cases than Europe (the numbers I found
| are a little bit fuzzy and use probably different
| methodology when collected, so this could well be an
| entirely statistical phenomenom).
|
| I was curious, because I (living in central Europe) could
| not think of a single case of identity theft in my social
| circles or a prominent case I ever heard of.
| blizdiddy wrote:
| We don't have a national ID system, just a single, poorly
| suited Social Security number that's been overloaded to
| serve as our entire identity in the eyes of the state.
| These numbers are effectively public knowledge, thanks to
| private credit agencies created to fill the gap when
| banks failed at risk assessment. We could've replaced
| this broken setup decades ago, but there's a vested
| political interest in ensuring federal programs fail, to
| justify further privatization and the dismantling of
| social services.
|
| A proper national ID and strong privacy laws would be
| obvious policy wins, but that would require competent
| lawmakers.
|
| In my lifetime, the most consequential federal
| legislation has been the DMCA (1998), the Patriot Act
| (2001), and Obamacare (2010), which effectively marked
| the end of meaningful legislative power and the handoff
| of governance to the executive branch.
| rgblambda wrote:
| It's a very similar situation in the UK, though the
| hostility towards National ID cards comes from the public
| not the government.
|
| Apparently people associate it with the authoritarianism
| of 1984 even though mandatory ID existed in 1948 when the
| novel was written.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What about ID.me that irs.gov uses for tax-related
| matters? When I tried to get it once, it is pretty hard
| to get authenticated -- required 2+ gov't IDs, plus pic
| of yourself holding them. That should be pretty safe. Not
| good enough? (Overall: I agree. There is no concept of a
| national ID in the US, except a passport which huge
| numbers of people do not have.)
| criddell wrote:
| As I understand it, it's mostly fundamentalist Christians
| blocking national IDs.
| mopenstein wrote:
| I'm not Christian and I don't want a federal ID. I don't
| even want a state ID but I will eventually be taken to
| prison if I continually get caught driving without one.
|
| Coincidentally and/or anecdotally I've never had my
| identity stolen.
| xienze wrote:
| You'd be wrong. It's coming from the same crowd that
| claims showing a driver's license or some other form of
| ID in order to vote is racist.
| derektank wrote:
| The last big push for a secure national identity system
| was during the 90s as part of the negotiation on the
| Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
| Act of 1996. It was opposed by fundamentalist Christians
| then, but it was more vociferously opposed by civil
| libertarian groups like the ACLU and the EFF, Cato, as
| well as immigrant rights groups like La Raza.
| criddell wrote:
| I'd argue that the fundies have more political clout than
| those other groups combined.
| derektank wrote:
| Half of the house Democrats, not exactly a group known
| for kowtowing to religious fundamentalists, voted against
| improving the design of social security cards. If 16 of
| the 91 that voted against the McCollum amendment had
| flipped from Nay to Yea, this would be a solved problem.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Or at least a different problem.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Based on what?
| sneak wrote:
| We have at least two different national ID systems in the
| US: passports, and Real ID.
|
| One of those two is as of last week or so required to
| board a flight in the USA.
| thequux wrote:
| The US does identity verification by asking for a
| driver's license (which has no chip or biometric data)
| and possibly a series of questions about your past drawn
| from public data. All of these credentials are laughably
| easy to spoof. Compare this to Europe, where every
| resident has an eID containing a keypair and X.509
| certificate signed by the government containing their
| personal details. It is trivial to check the validity of
| these cards and nearly impossible to forge without
| subverting either the national PKI or printing apparatus
| consp wrote:
| The security around the facilities which make the
| documents is also significant. Getting the printing
| apparatus is no small feat.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Compare this to Europe, where every resident has an eID
| containing a keypair and X.509 certificate signed by the
| government containing their personal details.
|
| Woah. First, on HN I keep seeing this term "Europe".
| Europe is 50 countries. Please try to be more specific.
| Did you mean EU? If yes, then my question: Really? All 27
| EU nations support and actually _use_ this identity
| programme with financial institutions? I never heard
| about it. And, just saying that it _exists_ isn 't
| enough. Do normies use it (like your parents &
| grandparents)?
| trinix912 wrote:
| It's an EU thing. Yes, normies do use it, as it is a chip
| embedded in your personal ID card and your passport. You
| hand your ID to an officer, they read the chip data and
| verify the signature. You don't have to know anything
| about how it works. It also contains biometrical data
| (your fingerprints, etc).
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Implementation of eIDAS is still in progress. It's not
| even mandatory for every citizen to haven an eID until
| end of 2026. And it's also not used yet everywhere for
| everything. But it's gradually growing.
|
| The first time I had a chance to use was just some months
| ago, when I could activate a SIM-card online through and
| my smartphone reading out my ID-card via NFC. I pay daily
| via NFC, but it's the first time ever I had to use the
| chip in my ID-Card, despite it having one for 15 years
| now. Laws and regulations are good in theory, but reality
| can be often quite a bit different.
| codedokode wrote:
| Fingerprints are collected only from criminals or people
| who visit US. Why did Europeans agree to being treated
| like criminals or tourists I don't understand.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Fingerprints are collected only from criminals or people
| who visit US. Why did Europeans agree to being treated
| like criminals or tourists I don't understand.
|
| Only if you assume that anyone who works for a SEC
| regulated company[0], applies for a California driver's
| license[1], current and former US Military personnel[2]
| healthcare workers, teachers, real estate agents, child
| care providers and others[3] are either "criminals" or
| "tourists."
|
| If so, into which bucket would you place CA driver's
| license applicants? Criminals? How about US Military
| personnel? Tourists?
|
| Please do elucidate.
|
| [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.17f-2
|
| [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-
| services/occu...
|
| [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1440f
|
| [3] https://blog.certifixlivescan.com/state-by-state-
| guide-to-fi...
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| It's currently being deployed across the european
| union[1], I think the 2026 target they gave it's a tad
| too unrealistic, wouldn't be surprised if we get major
| coverage not until 2030.
|
| [1]https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-
| policy/priorities-...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That target is for the new and improved version where you
| can use NFC to self-identify on the web. The old version
| (with a smart card inside, so only offline auth) was
| rolled out in Germany in 2010.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Can't remember if they ever released the 1st version
| either in Italy or France, a few days ago my
| septuagenarian mum got the NFC enabled one in Italy.
|
| The iOS app is surprisingly decent. She could still
| request the old, paper-only id but this one could be also
| used to pay for local ordinances straight from her phone,
| and it's less cumbersome than the SPID-based[1]
| authentication.
|
| [1]https://it-m-wikipedia-
| org.translate.goog/wiki/SPID?_x_tr_sl...
| cyco130 wrote:
| Don't know about the whole Europe (or EU) but I strongly
| suspect it is indeed (almost) everywhere. I'm Turkish and
| Turkey has it too. And yes, my mother uses it, and my
| grandparents used it when they were alive. You can't do
| anything government-related, open a bank account, or even
| visit a hospital without your government-issued ID card
| (which contains a chip). And a few decades ago, before
| the chips, there were other security measures tied to ID
| cards.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > identity theft
|
| It is not identity theft. It is identity fraud.
|
| Implying that you can lose your identity to someone is a
| way to shift blame from the banks or whatever entity
| being defrauded.
| f6v wrote:
| > I was curious, because I (living in central Europe)
| could not think of a single case of identity theft in my
| social circles or a prominent case I ever heard of.
|
| But there're tons of scams involving stealing your
| personal id and security codes. It's wide spread from
| Belgium to Estonia.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's apparently no good way of doing this. Denmark
| have a system for identifying yourself online. It has a
| 2FA component, either an app on your phone, where you
| have to swipe or something (I don't use it) or a physical
| code generator. It should be basically impossible to
| break, except it's not, because people will get calls
| from "their bank" asking the to do the 2FA stuff.
| Basically any measure put in to prevent this is being
| circumvented by people believing that the bank, who
| barely wants to deal with customers, would actually call
| them up Thursday evening.
|
| I think the current solution is to have users scan a QR
| code, if they are on a different device than the one with
| their authenticator app. I haven't hear of anyone with
| the hardware token being scammed though, but most of the
| people who have the hardware version, do so because we
| don't even trust an app on our phone.
|
| But yes, there are PLENTY of cases of identity theft even
| in countries with electronic identification solutions.
|
| One thing the US could do, but won't, is have an account
| registered with the federal and state governments. Any
| money coming from the government should ONLY go to that
| account and it changing it should require a thorough
| identity validation.
| f6v wrote:
| QR code is how mitid works. You scan and you swipe.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Often issues such as this are the result of people involved
| in the verification process, being bribed or taking cash for
| approvals. This is even more likely to happen if you
| outsource part of the process.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Often issues such as this are the result of people
| involved in the verification process, being bribed or
| taking cash for approvals. This is even more likely to
| happen if you outsource part of the process.
|
| Often, posters on HN engage in pedophilia, tax evasion and
| satanic rituals. This is even more likely if you allow just
| anyone to create an account.
|
| That's ridiculous, right? Because I provide no evidence for
| my statement whatsoever. And yet, I manage to paint every
| HN user with that broad brush.
|
| It's an example of 'reductio ad absurdum'. If you have any
| evidence that your hypothesis is any more valid than mine,
| please do provide it. Otherwise, you're just smearing
| people without any reason except to validate your world
| view.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Social engineering hacks are the primary hack. If you're
| not familiar with them, you aren't security conscious.
|
| SIM card swaps have been reportedly repeatedly, as being
| a social engineering hack. Often the exchange has been
| done via gift cards or crypto. More than one such hack
| resulted in millions being stolen.
|
| Your attack dog response is quite unwarranted. Why are
| you so upset at a generic comment, indicating that
| fraudulent identity verification can be done on both
| ends?
|
| Do you imagine that university admissions employees are
| perfect, uncorruptible? Is this some weird, US political
| minefield?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Social engineering hacks are the primary hack. If you're
| not familiar with them, you aren't security conscious.
|
| You didn't say that financial aid administrators were
| being "socially engineered. Nor did you say that they had
| their SIMs swapped. Rather, you said[0]:
| "Often issues such as this are the result of people
| involved in the verification process, being bribed or
| taking cash for approvals."
|
| That might well be the case here. But unless you actually
| have even a shred of evidence (do you? if so, please
| provide it), you're painting thousands of people with the
| same broad brush.
|
| >Do you imagine that university admissions employees are
| perfect, uncorruptible? Is this some weird, US political
| minefield?
|
| I do not. But I also don't make _completely unsupported
| accusations /attacks_ against random strangers as you
| did. Not a "political minefield" at all. You were just
| talking out of your ass and I called you on it. Full
| stop.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43924650
| bbarnett wrote:
| We are discussing, in this sub-thread, methods by which
| people masquerade as others, stealing funds, abusing
| resources, and so on. The post I replied to was musing,
| essentially, "How could this possibly happen!?"
|
| My statement is entirely valid in this context.
|
| Social engineering attacks are a well known method to
| hack, and masquerading as others is indeed a hack.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > If you have any evidence that your hypothesis is any
| more valid than mine, please do provide it.
|
| I don't know about evidence, but logically your example
| is bad. One is talking about specifically fraud issues,
| and their most likely cause. You're just generally
| talking about people.
| xienze wrote:
| > If not, why are the schools sending aid payments sand ISIR?
| Or does CA run its own state-level aid programs that skip the
| federal forms completely (and botching the ID verification on
| their own)?
|
| If I had to guess, this is probably to make the process
| easier for illegal immigrants, this being California and all.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I have a number of family members that work at different
| levels of government facing the public. Based on your
| rhetoric and their stories there's a high probability that
| you'd fall under the group I'd consider 'howlers'.
|
| What is that?
|
| The people that blame everyone else for problems without
| understanding any of the complexity of the system.
| Everything is some scary other persons fault. Then later
| they have to interface with the system after the laws they
| have promoted and they are aghast about how abusive the
| system has become.
|
| I got to see this in person just a few days ago. I was
| renewing my license in Texas and had a stack of all the
| proper identification that I needed because I triple
| checked online on what I'd actually need. In front of me
| was an older gentleman that evidently had waited till the
| last day to renew his license. He didn't have any of the
| needed documentation, in this case his birth certificate.
| The clerk told him that unless he had that record he could
| not renew. He was all pissed and storming out and said "I
| bet it was the democrats that make us do that!".
|
| It is this wild disconnect I see quite often where I see
| people that want _others_ inconvenienced, you know people
| from other places or people that don 't look the same, but
| proceed with shock when the rules apply to them also and
| start howling about it.
| xienze wrote:
| > He was all pissed and storming out and said "I bet it
| was the democrats that make us do that!".
|
| If your story is actually true, that man is somehow
| oblivious to the fact that Democrats are the ones always
| bringing up the "it's so hard to get a driver's license!
| And racist to require one for anything!" arguments. I'm
| not sure how you've come to the conclusion that I want to
| inconvenience people out of spite. I'd like to
| inconvenience illegal immigrants from getting their
| education subsidized by citizens. California wants the
| opposite.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >If your story is actually true,
|
| Go in an sit around any precinct courthouse or state
| document renewal facility in Texas in the lobby for a
| week and you'll see it multiple times a week. It's not
| some particularly rare occurrence.
|
| The sovereign citizens are common too, and they really
| start howling commonly having to get escorted out.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why would any of the involved parties care at all? It's not
| their money being sent to scammers, so it's not a problem for
| them.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Uh, federal financial aid is absolutely all of our money
| (acquired from taxes).
|
| And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for everybody
| else.
|
| And the overhead of fighting this eats into school resources,
| driving up the tuition that's forcing the loan in the first
| place.
|
| And as a professor/instructor, that's money that could go to
| funding more tenured positions (vs adjunct spots or other
| "non-permanent" teachers).
|
| So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an individual
| might not care. But after any thought at all, one should see
| that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > And the overhead of fighting this eats into school
| resources
|
| Not if they continue to ignore it, because once again, it's
| not their money being sent to scammers.
|
| > And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for
| everybody else.
|
| Doesn't sound like a problem for the involved parties.
|
| > So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an
| individual might not care. But after any thought at all,
| one should see that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.
|
| You might care. I might care. But I guarantee that the
| involved parties do not care for even three seconds of
| their day about it. They have much more important things to
| think about, such as what color of the ballons for their
| kids next birthday party.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > But I guarantee that the involved parties do not care
| for even three seconds of their day about it.
|
| yes -- based on real life interaction with real low-level
| accounting middle class bureaucrats in California, I
| agree that most of the people who are professionals in
| Federal student aid do not personally care about this
| bigger system. More importantly they care about their own
| paychecks, which most of them use to buy things for their
| own family events.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Probably course completion rates and other metrics that make
| your service eligible for loans in the first place.
| nine_k wrote:
| If course completion rate becomes the metric that brings in
| money, it will quickly soar to 100% or maybe above. See:
| Goodhart's Law.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Well, that's kind of the whole idea behind college, isn't
| it...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It becomes meaningless when the professors are pressured
| to pass failing students to make the numbers look good.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Like what happens with lower schools under the "no child
| left behind" doctrine?
| harvey9 wrote:
| I was thinking of students who dropped out. It's a
| different fraud if the institution is claiming re-
| enrollments that never happened.
| autoexec wrote:
| Students aren't able to get into classes when bots are taking
| all the spots. Teachers actually care about educating
| students so they don't want to have their time wasted by
| bots. There's only so much loan money to go around and the
| schools want to get that cash into their own pockets, but the
| schools don't get any when scammers are running off with it
| to funnel money to other countries or whatever else they're
| doing. Similarly, students who really need the help can't get
| it when it all goes to someone who isn't interested in paying
| for education.
|
| Schools have another problem with "ghost students" in general
| which is that there's a lot of other stuff going on at
| schools that depend on real students being there. Vendors,
| club activities, sporting/social events, nearby bars and
| restaurants etc. There's an entire ecosystem on and around
| campus which is created or supported by real students. All
| that non-classroom stuff helps make the school more
| attractive to students and often directly generates income
| for the school as well, but little of it would exist or be
| worthwhile if the campus is a ghost town.
| toast0 wrote:
| When I was at community college (~ 2000), if the section
| you wanted was full at registration, you'd register in
| another section (in case), but show up at the section you
| wanted and talk with the instructor. Depending on the
| course/instructor, you'd might need to show up for the
| first week and anybody who hadn't attended in the first
| week would be dropped and those who had attended but
| weren't registered could take those spaces. Sometimes the
| instructor would do that at the first meeting. You'd go to
| the section you were registered in as well, and let the
| instructor know there (sometimes it'd be the same
| instructor and then maybe you wouldn't need to attend both
| sections). Not ideal, but registration order was based on
| completed credits, and after one semester it got a lot
| easier to get into the sections you wanted; students (real
| or not) that haven't completed any classes get to pick
| sections last, so once you've shown you're willing and able
| to complete classes, you're good. (Protip: check if taking
| any class in the summer will help you get into the sections
| you want in the fall)
|
| At that time, you could drop classes in the first two weeks
| for a full refund.
| alistairSH wrote:
| That works pretty well for a full-time student, but two
| points...
|
| - If you're working/raising a kid/whatever, you don't
| necessarily have the time to drop into classes that might
| be full. There is likely a non-zero number of people who
| see their preferred section is full and don't move beyond
| that (people taking one-off classes, or slowly working
| through a professional certificate).
|
| - That's a lot of extra mental bandwidth for all
| involved. Yeah, it works, but life would be better if it
| wasn't the norm.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If you don't have time to go to the class, you don't have
| time to go to the class.
| awongh wrote:
| Probably the next step for online-only courses is for the
| ghost student to start submitting AI generated
| homework....
| pbohun wrote:
| Whose money do you think is being sent to scammers?
|
| Also, decent human beings care about things that are
| unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or
| not.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Whose money do you think is being sent to scammers?
|
| I guess the tax payers money? Otherwise they would have
| nipped this in the bud.
|
| > Also, decent human beings care about things that are
| unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or
| not.
|
| Decent people are sometimes quite far between, most people
| would never lift a finger even an inch if they don't have
| anything to gain personally.
| autoexec wrote:
| > most people would never lift a finger even an inch if
| they don't have anything to gain personally.
|
| Personally, I haven't found that to be the case. If
| you've got sources that say otherwise I'd be interested
| in seeing them.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Well, we're focused on extracting as much money as
| possible from people who try to pay loans with awful
| terms. Meanwhile, the banks have no incentive to do
| meaningful vetting as the loans are guaranteed.
| mopenstein wrote:
| Like stealing money under threat of force from many
| individuals and handing it over to some random scammer?
|
| That kind of immoral act? You might not be as decent a
| person as you might think.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to
| real estate course, Pugh said she'd normally drop three to
| five from her roster who don't start the course or make
| contact with her at the start of the semester.
|
| Key word: "popular."
|
| A dean's most important question: "How are we gonna pay the
| bills?"
|
| Well, if the number of ghost students in a department's
| _popular_ class just doubled and eventually get dropped from
| the roll, that means the number of bona fide students
| completing that class also went down.
|
| If you're the professor of that class, you want to make it
| crystal clear to the dean that this is an otherwise _popular_
| class getting hit by a scam, and _not_ a class that 's
| organically becoming less popular year over year.
|
| Communicating this distinction to the dean is paramount-- the
| prof's pay and job stability depends on the scam being
| addressed for next quarter/semester. And those concerns
| bubble up from dept dean up the administration.
|
| I mean, as I write this I start to wonder the opposite of
| you-- how could anyone in this chain of authority _not_
| prioritize addressing this issue?
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Some people take pride in their work.
| setr wrote:
| The lost money comes from the taxpayer. But that loan money
| was going to be used to pay the school; and presumably if the
| student doesn't have that loan money, they ain't gonna be
| paying (or attending, because they can no longer afford to do
| so). So schools should care. And the students should care --
| they don't get to join the school. And the government should
| care -- their funds just went into a void. And the taxpayers
| should care -- their money just went into a void, and some
| number of their kids just got denied college access.
|
| What involved party shouldn't care?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think they're making a cynical comment about incentives
| and government waste.
|
| There's some truth to this if the people in charge of the
| process are not the ones paying.
|
| I've seen gratuitous waste in government due to
| indifference. It can happen in the private sector too.
| permo-w wrote:
| >The lost money comes from the taxpayer
|
| not necessarily
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But that loan money was going to be used to pay the
| school; and presumably if the student doesn't have that
| loan money, they ain't gonna be paying (or attending,
| because they can no longer afford to do so). So schools
| should care.
|
| I don't think this is a correct model of the situation. As
| far as I know, it isn't the case that there's a fixed
| budget for student loan disbursals and all of it will go to
| some school or other unless it gets stolen. Rather, if more
| people ask for student loans, more money gets disbursed,
| and if fewer people ask for loans, less money gets
| disbursed. So the amount of money the school gets wouldn't
| be affected.
| Loughla wrote:
| >stop giving cash as financial aid and instead give some type
| of credit that can only be spent on/at the school.
|
| Many students use their F.A. to pay for groceries or rent.
|
| Turning it into company store credit is a really bad idea.
| rwky wrote:
| When I did my degree many moons ago in three UK I got a student
| loan like many people. The loan company sends the money
| directly to the university not the student. Weirdly though when
| I did my masters they sent the money to me.
| EGreg wrote:
| But why can't the scammers simply use AI to pass as actual
| people at scale?
|
| Let's say in 10-15 years they'll have robots that can pass for
| humans as well. Then what? How are you going to tell who's a
| real human?
| D-Coder wrote:
| By the legally-mandated "R." in front of their name.
|
| (Isaac Asimov, _The Caves of Steel_.)
| pc86 wrote:
| It's been a few years since I was in college, but back in the
| '00s when it was relevant to me, there was nothing I could do
| to get cash. I submitted financial aid documents (to include
| federally-subsidized loans), and money went from the lender to
| the school. If there was an underpayment, I had to submit more
| docs and the lender sent more money. If there was an
| overpayment, the school refunded the lender and my statement
| was updated.
|
| Other than completely unsecured private loans how the hell are
| 18 year olds getting cash for their student loans?
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah I'm puzzled by this too - I suppose it helped that I
| wasn't living in school housing, I was living at home for
| most of college, so my only college expenses were tuition,
| transportation, and supplies, all of which could be paid
| directly by my loan issuers but - yeah, I never saw a cent of
| cash, either through student loans or financial aid, it all
| just went directly to my school.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I got a cash deposit for living expenses. I had to pay rent,
| after all, while out of town at school. Hell, I needed food
| too. The payment to the school was handled exactly as you
| say.
| tuxpenguine wrote:
| This is exactly the issue that Johnny Harris talked about in
| his video about the poverty industrial complex:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3nwdRIXGjc
| qoez wrote:
| > "Bots don't act on their own, there is almost always a human
| behind it"
|
| Almost always? There always is
| koolba wrote:
| Depends on how far up the chain you go. I can see some oddball
| situations created when vibe coding meets unsecured AWS access
| keys. Imagine a rogue prompt deploying a self perpetuating worm
| that creates scam apps and uses the funds to create more scams.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Gonna fall apart at the first hallucinated API call.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Almost certainly.
| timewizard wrote:
| Setup a bot. Then die.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Why is their any surprise? This is exactly the behavior being
| rewarded
| WalterBright wrote:
| Reminds me of a Frontline episode that was investigating
| dentists who did major dental work for poor people for payments
| from the government. The dental work was excessive and
| completely unnecessary. Dentists would set up entire clinics to
| do this and soak the government.
|
| The laughable thing was the Frontline journalists were
| gobsmacked by people responding to big money incentives. They
| couldn't believe it!
|
| There are also clinics set up to optimize extracting money from
| medicare.
| toast0 wrote:
| > In the 2024 calendar year, the [California Community College]
| chancellor's office estimates that 31.4% of its college
| applications were fraudulent, a spokesperson for the office told
| SFGATE. The chancellor's office also considers it fraudulent both
| to apply to a college with no intention of attending any
| institution and to enroll in a college with no intention of
| actually showing up.
|
| If these are the criteria, it seems hard to distinguish high
| school seniors that are going go through the motions, but don't
| actually intend to go to college from people who are trying to
| pocket financial aid without doing the time in the classroom. (Is
| it financial aid fraud if you legitimately qualify for the aid,
| and show up to the classroom with no intent to pass or graduate?
| If the aid is non-recourse, it might be reasonable as a person to
| do so)
|
| Specifically for California Community Colleges, the stakes are so
| low for enrollment, I can see a lot of people enrolling just in
| case, then deciding not to go and forgetting to notify the
| college. California Community Colleges are an amazing resource,
| though; I think more people should use them, and more states
| should build out their community colleges using California as an
| example. When I was in school in ~2000ish, Wisconsin community
| college charged the same amount per credit at UW and the
| Wisconsin Community College system; which seems like a great way
| to get people not to use community colleges.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And elsewhere it says "the office estimates that 0.21% of the
| system's financial aid was fraudulently disbursed" which sounds
| pretty low and maybe not worth worrying about. "Zero fraud"
| sounds nice but probably costs more to attain than it's worth.
| downrightmike wrote:
| If only that college taught a statistics class or had a math
| dept that could explain this.
| jfengel wrote:
| The math is easy. Getting people to accept what it means is
| damn near impossible.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Like others mentioned, they describe the 'agonizing' problem, but
| don't explain how it works. The most charitable read is it's just
| plain old lazy journalism, the least charitable is they are
| hiding something and dancing around the issue.
|
| What makes SF colleges susceptible to this? Are they implying
| it's incredibly easy for anyone to fill in a form online without
| any ID or verification and they get aid? Ok, why was that
| allowed? I am guessing it's to make it easier for people, to
| apply but also it looks good for enrollment -- "look at how many
| students we have". Being strict about verifying applications
| would mean also lower enrollment numbers. Some classes might not
| have enough students and would get cancelled. So someone there
| and possibly many someones looked the other way for many years.
|
| Let's take a look:
|
| https://www.ccsf.edu/apply-ccsf
|
| > Starting February 2, 2024, CCCApply will be integrating
| identity verification through ID.me. ID.me will help protect
| student identities and prevent fraudulent students from taking
| seats in classes at CCSF. This is an optional feature for
| students.
|
| > For students who cannot use ID.me, click on "Verify Later" to
| skip the ID.me verification process.
|
| Ok, so still no need for any ID at all, it's all optional.
|
| Yes, they want homeless or undocumented people from no valid
| identity documentation (from country of origin), minors? to have
| access. Ok, that's laudable, but shouldn't there be some kind of
| in person verification at least. I guess "verify later" is that
| part and it's skipped.
|
| If you want to apply then you're funneled to either federal
| student aid, or California Dream act aid
|
| https://www.ccsf.edu/paying-college/financial-aid-office/how...
|
| One of those probably make it easier to apply to with a bot and
| without a valid ID. It would be nice of the article did that
| research instead of relying on random people do to it for them.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I agree, I think it's dancing around the issue of
| identification, possibly undocumented persons, international
| students and cultural sensitivity. To push for greater identity
| verification could be interpreted by some as leaning in towards
| the mandatory ID political issue. Basically, schools don't want
| to be seen supporting mandatory ID because it makes them look
| aligned with the conservatives/Trump.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| It's not really about looks. If you collect this data, and
| enroll a student who is seeking asylum, the current
| administration will attempt to get this data from you to send
| your student to life in prison in El Salvador. Which is an
| impact a bit beyond looking aligned. (Of course, reasonable
| people can disagree about whether life in prison is an
| appropriate punishment for seeking asylum through legal
| channels)
| rdtsc wrote:
| > If you collect this data, and enroll a student who is
| seeking asylum
|
| > a student who is seeking asylum, the current
| administration will attempt to get this data from you to
| send your student to life in prison in El Salvador.
|
| That could make sense at one level, yeah. But doesn't US
| CIS already have contact information for all who applied
| for asylum in order to process the asylum application? And
| besides, this doesn't seem like an issue that just started
| this year.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Surely there is something that can be done in between
| "Giving them free taxpayer money without verifying that
| they exist" and "sending them to prison in el salvador for
| the crime of applying for asylum"
| jfengel wrote:
| Sure. But "sending them to prison for the crime of
| applying for asylum" is the position in power at the
| moment, and they don't seem to be amenable to compromise.
| So you accept that as a fait accompli and design your own
| actions around that.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > But "sending them to prison for the crime of applying
| for asylum" is the position in power at the moment,
|
| But if they applied for asylum doesn't the US govt
| already have their information in order to, well, process
| the asylum application. So, there is nothing for SF
| College to hide. Not saying that it all has to make
| sense, but that part doesn't seem to add up somehow.
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| Oh it makes sense when you translate "applying for asylum
| " to the more accurate "illegal alien asking for
| government money".
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This article from 2014 explains it better:
| https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr...
| rdtsc wrote:
| That's a good summary, thanks! It covers Pell Grants well.
|
| > A former college president and financial aid director in
| Atlanta used the names of former students and individuals who
| never attended the college to fraudulently obtain $5 million
| in grants.10 ... In another case, two former financial aid
| advisers and a tax preparation business operator in Chicago
| were charged with filing fake tax returns to obtain nearly
| $1.5 million in financial aid for 75 students over a 2-year
| period.
|
| That's interesting. Maybe it's worth taking a closer look at
| the college administration? They have both the access, the
| knowledge, the opportunity and even the official motive - to
| bolster admission numbers.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It isn't limited to California. I've encountered it as a
| professor at a midwest community college.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Perhaps they are targeting community colleges in general,
| because of the proportion of online course there is higher
| and they usually have fewer IT and administrative workers to
| keep an eye on things. That's disheartening, community
| college, are gems and it help many people get up on their
| feet who can't afford to go to the larger universities.
|
| It's was sad to see in https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-
| articles/pell-grant-fr... that in one case the administrators
| of the college were the criminals doing it.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| We are part of a system where each school is named College
| Name - City Name. And we were told that schools in towns
| earlier in the alphabet were getting hit before our school
| did.
| _m_p wrote:
| Faculty and administrators were already stealing millions of
| dollars in financial aid by making tuition so exorbitant.
| nottorp wrote:
| Looks to me like a consequence of cost saving measures and the
| lack of an ID system.
|
| Just like identity theft etc.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| California determines how much money each community college gets
| using the 'Student Centered Funding Formula' (SCFF), which has
| three parts:
|
| - 70% based on # students (adjusted for whether they're part time
| or full time)
|
| - 20% based on # students who receive Pell Grants or similar
|
| - 10% based on student outcomes like graduation or transfers to
| four-year colleges
|
| Fake students would inflate the first two. So, even if fake
| students deflate the final item (eventually), what incentive do
| community college leaders (who presumably care about the number
| of staff they're able to employ) have to expel fake students, or
| even to be honest about their prevalence?
| SayItAintSo2 wrote:
| This is easy money for schools, students and faculty. Everyone
| except the taxpayers are making money. I taught at a CC and this
| went on for years-real students enrolling and not attending,
| false identities enrolled, no mandatory drops for students not
| attending or doing work. Why? Well, between Pell grants,
| scholarships and other grant sources, "students" are making
| 10-30K tax free, the school keeps all the payments if the
| "student" stays enrolled through census date as well as keeping
| all of their grant money, indirect and directs on TRIO grants,
| etc. Faculty sign these students out after the census date, thus
| having an EASY class(and breaking the law--that form requires a
| date of last attendance). I was not in CA and I watched dozens of
| students do this and the college was "blind" to the fraud...very
| convenient. The 'agonizing' problem is the scrutiny on a multi-
| million/billion dollar scam. We need students in these classes to
| call and report to ED when their class shows 20 enrolled but only
| 2 turn up each class. Offer them some student loan forgiveness
| and make then aware of what it costs them.
| Stealthisbook wrote:
| There are so many layers of fraud to make this scam work. Fake
| enrollment seems easy enough, but financial aid requires a valid
| identity with real tax info. If you've already stolen an identity
| to snag a tax refund, I guess might as well file a FAFSA. But,
| the lion's share of financial aid goes directly to the school
| while only any remainder after tuition and fees goes to the
| student. I feel like unless this is happening at scale committed
| by relatively few actors, the return isn't worth the effort... if
| there isn't some further institutional coordination helping
| things along
| SayItAintSo2 wrote:
| At a community college, the lion's share of aid goes to the
| student for books, living expenses, etc. If they get a maximum
| Pell(~6K), a scholarship for underserved(~3K) and student loans
| (upwards of 10k) for 4k tuition, they are pocketing quite a
| bit. The community college can then dip into the state and
| national funding (TRIO, job readiness, local employer support).
| One student eligible for financial aid at a community college
| is worth about 3x what one student paying their own way is
| worth. How difficult would it be to verify identity and enforce
| attendance? THey don't to inflate their numbers.
| paxys wrote:
| I see mentions of "bots" and "AI" all over the article but is
| there a single actual example that shows that the fake students
| are AI bots? As opposed to the much simpler explanation that real
| people are signing up, collecting aid and then ghosting?
| paxys wrote:
| > the office estimates that 0.21% of the system's financial aid
| was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said
|
| The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. If your financial aid
| process actually has 0% fraud then it is guaranteed that (1) you
| spent more resources vetting applicants than saving from fraud
| and (2) a large chunk of deserving applications were denied in
| the process just to be extra careful. So the 0.21% seems pretty
| reasonable to me.
| kassner wrote:
| I think that depends on the ratio between detected and
| undetected fraud. Some fraud will only be detected once they
| find no one to pay for loans, or when the person being
| collected has go thru an insurmountable bureaucracy to prove
| they never enrolled it.
|
| Given the evolution of the technology, I'd say 0.21% is neither
| static and guaranteed to raise significantly in the to near
| future if the identification issues don't get solved overnight.
| rr808 wrote:
| If there are over a million people in community college in CA
| so 0.21% is a huge amount of money.
|
| https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/620
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| The argument here is that it would also cost a huge amount of
| money (potentially more money overall) to vet every applicant
| better.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hey, there are no shortage of people that would spend a
| billion dollars trying to save a million dollars.
| newsclues wrote:
| "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero." No, the optimal
| amount of fraud is ZERO. The cost of fraud detection and
| prevention is different, but in an ideal society, the taxpayers
| aren't paying for fraud (because the people don't scam the
| government).
|
| If fraud detection is so expensive, maybe it's important to be
| more selective of who has access to the community and keep the
| scammers out.
| frontfor wrote:
| OP is making a reference to patio11's article
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-
| fra....
|
| "Ideal society" doesn't exist.
|
| And how would you "be more selective" and "keep scammers out"
| without incurring more costs? At some point, it costs way
| more to prevent the last 0.1% or 0.001% of fraud than would
| be saved by preventing said fraud. And the cost might be paid
| by non-fraud being detected as false positive.
| newsclues wrote:
| Acceptable and optimal are different words.
|
| I worked in retail loss prevention, what is acceptable
| isn't optimal.
| yowzadave wrote:
| > I worked in retail loss prevention
|
| Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be
| balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than
| the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would
| have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost
| of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the
| more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the
| more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact
| the business in other ways), so there definitely is an
| "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and
| preventive measures.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You don't live in an optimal world so what use is it
| talking about? Are you also doing your business
| calculations using frictionless spherical cows in a
| vacuum?
|
| Simply put _every_ living system on the planet earth has
| some amount of parasites. To have no parasites at all
| would require _massive_ amounts of energy by the host to
| ensure said parasites don 't exist. If the host can spend
| a much smaller amount of energy and ensure that 99% of
| parasites don't exist _that is optimal_ thereby negating
| your original premise.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I don't know what CCSF's problem is, but this is the second major
| fraud case I know of that involves them specifically.
|
| A few years ago (this was pre-pandemic, around 2018-19), you
| could buy those "unlimited-storage, never-expiring" Google Drive
| accounts online. I was curious about how they worked, and it
| turned out a few of my less knowledgeable friends had some. The
| ones I could get my hands on were all @ccsf.edu addresses, with
| randomly-generated but somewhat plausible-sounding names and
| surnames (something like "Zyx Ngehirda" or "Anqomi Horezis",
| names made up but it's roughly what they looked like).
|
| From what I could figure out from these, I think you were able to
| sign up as a CCSF student with very little verification, and as
| long as you didn't take any courses, you didn't have to pay. You
| still got all your accounts set up though, including Google
| Drive, and you could sell those for a profit.
|
| The accounts weren't actually as unlimited as the seller claimed,
| I asked a few months later and they were apparently shut down by
| that point. One person reported receiving an angry email (on that
| Google account) notifying them that the account will be removed
| if they don't sign up for a course.
|
| This scam must have been heavily automated and very widespread,
| the accounts were sold on Allegro (Polish Amazon) for $1-$2. It's
| possible other institutions were involved too, the few accounts I
| knew of were bought at roughly the same time, so they could have
| come from the same "batch."
| stretchwithme wrote:
| There've been so many scams in California, I suspect someone is
| designing scams into these programs. Whether it's unemployment,
| Calpers pensions or student loans, it seems California government
| is allergic to common sense.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| > 0.21% of the system's financial aid was fraudulently disbursed
|
| This is weird wording, or perhaps just lazy.
|
| It's probably supposed to mean _fraudulently claimed_ , because
| _fraudulently disbursed_ means the agent perform the dispersal is
| acting fraudulently.
|
| Though there's also the possibility of _that_.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| This isn't limited just to California. I teach at a community
| college in the midwest and we have encountered this too in our
| online classes. Last semester I had 3-4 in one online class that
| were fake but a colleague had about 1/3 of her class.
|
| They start the class doing work so that means we have to grade
| it. I first became suspicious when these fake students were
| posting message board posts that were all weirdly indented like
| they were from an email reply chain. I thought it was weird until
| I talked to my colleague who had the same thing. Then one of htem
| posted a message that was "Hello, I am a student from [insert
| town name here]...."
|
| We turned the names in and the university used an id verification
| system and got them out of the class.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Relevant (in my opinion "deep") meme video concerning related
| topics:
|
| Raiden Warned About AI Censorship - MGS2 Codec Call (2023
| Version)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
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