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Community colleges across California have received over 65,000 fake financial aid applications, the Associated Press reported.
The fake applications were filed at 105 community college campuses out of the state's 116 campuses on behalf of first-time applicants older than 30, earning less than $40,000 and who were looking to earn a two-year degree, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"We were kind of scratching our heads going, 'Did or didn't 60,000 extra older adult students really attempt to apply to community colleges here in the last few months?'" said Patrick Perry, the director of policy, research and data for the California Student Aid Commission.
Perry notified college officials of the applications last week and since then, he said the number of suspected fraudulent applications surpassed 65,000.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General is looking into the scam.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
The Los Angeles Times reported a student aid official detected the applications on a routine check of federal financial aid records while faculty members were flagging unusual surges in class enrollment that they suspected could be driven 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 financial aid was disbursed to fake students. The system, which has received more than $1.6 billion in emergency COVID-19 relief for low-income students, is investigating.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General declined comment.
The largest numbers of fake applications were reported at Cerritos, Pasadena, Chaffey, Merced and Antelope Valley.
Two professors at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton said they became suspicious upon seeing their online class enrollment surge in early August, including many students who were taking classes unrelated to their major. They later noticed many of the suspicious students didn't have phone numbers or had out-of-state area codes.
"It looked like we were making a comeback in spite of the pandemic," said Tara Cuslidge-Staiano, a journalism professor who believes more than two-thirds of her 60 class members are bots. "The hardest part of all of this is that we're not doing as well as we thought we were doing."
Valerie Lundy-Wagner, the colleges' interim vice chancellor of digital innovation and infrastructure, announced stricter security measures Monday including the required monthly reporting of suspected and confirmed incidents of registration and financial aid fraud.
About 20 percent of recent traffic on the colleges' main page for online applications was "malicious and bot-related," she said, adding that much of this traffic was detected by software installed by the college system in July.
