California community colleges have received more than 65,000 false financial aid applications, the Associated Press reported.
The bogus applications were submitted at 105 community college campuses outside of the state’s 116 campuses on behalf of first-time applicants age 30 and older, earning less than $ 40,000, and seeking a two-year degree, reported the Los Angeles Times .
“We were a little scratching our heads and thinking, ‘Did 60,000 older students really try or not try to apply to community colleges here in the last few months? ‘”Said Patrick Perry, director of policy, research and data for the California Student Aid Commission.
Perry notified university officials of the applications last week and has since said the number of suspected fraudulent applications has exceeded 65,000.
The US Department of Education Office of the Inspector General is investigating the scam.
For more reports from the Associated Press, see below.
Los Angeles Times reported that a student aid official spotted the applications in a routine check of federal financial aid records as faculty members pointed to unusual increases in class enrollment that they suspected could be triggered by fake students or bots.
Perry said he believes the problem was caught before significant amounts of aid were distributed to scammers.
Officials at California community colleges declined to say whether the financial aid was disbursed to bogus students. The system, which has received more than $ 1.6 billion in COVID-19 emergency aid for low-income students, is investigating.
The US Department of Education Office of the Inspector General declined to comment.
The highest number of false applications were reported in Cerritos, Pasadena, Chaffey, Merced, and Antelope Valley.
Two professors at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton said they became suspicious when they saw their online class enrollment increase in early August, including many students who were taking classes unrelated to their major. They later noticed that many of the students suspects did not have out-of-state phone numbers or area codes.
“It seemed like we were coming back despite the pandemic,” said Tara Cuslidge-Staiano, a journalism professor who believes more than two-thirds of the 60 members of her class are robots. “The hardest part of all this is that we are not doing as well as we thought we were doing. ”
Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Acting Vice Chancellor for Digital for Universities This is a brief summary.
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