Online scammers will expose any perceived weakness. How is this going to be stopped?
The College Fix reports:
Thousands of ‘fake students’ enrolled in California community colleges seeking financial aidThe California Community Colleges system is being overwhelmed by thousands of fake students, or “bots,” applying and enrolling in classes to scam money from financial aid.Kim Rich, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College, first noticed the issue during the summer semester in June 2021, when she discovered multiple “students” in her online class exhibiting suspicious behavior: submitting work done by someone outside the class, registering for the same courses, and using profile photos pulled from the internet.Since then, Rich says she has experienced “roadblock after roadblock” in bringing the issue to the administration’s attention. The district seems not to care, even though, as she previously told The Epoch Times, Rich believes between one-third to one-half of enrolled students could be fake.She came to these numbers by surveying hundreds of class rosters, both from her own college and other schools in the system.“In some classes, 95 percent of the students I believed were fake. In other classes, it might have only been 5 percent,” Rich said in an interview with The College Fix. “The point of it was there are a lot of them there. It’s a huge hit, enrollment-wise, if you were to remove those students.”Rich’s guesses are confirmed by official numbers from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which determined that approximately 20 percent of the traffic for the systemwide student application system, CCCApply, is “malicious and bot-related.”
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