23 ms·

65k fake students applied for financial aid in wide community college scam

269 points by hbcondo714 5y ago

1-6 5y ago
Whoever gets caught will probably get a slap on the wrist.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  If it's anything like the CA UI benefit scams, the money is mostly going abroad to organized crime in Nigeria, Russia etc. Edit: guys... it's literally true. Come on https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/international-fraud-ring-steals-billions-in-edd-money-from-california/ https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/international-fra....
- evilotto 5y ago
  Or the system (laws or computers, take your pick) will be updated to make it harder to get assistance which will impact the individuals who genuinely need it while not having much of an impact on the massive organized fraud operations.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
This country badly needs a national ID system.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Does the SSN not mostly fulfill that need? Edit: The SSN seems a lot like JavaScript at this point. Y'all are talking about how you would never use it for anything and yet it's the one thing everyone is using for identity verification these days.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    No, it doesn't. It's not meant as a secure identifier and it doesn't provide for identity proofing. A national ID systems, as only_as_i_fall stated, is required. A previous comment I wrote on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851 Someone in the trenches wrote about it: https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-solve-identity-once-and-for-all https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-...
    - duxup 5y ago
      I recall an interview with someone in charge of the Social Security Administration about how they were constantly asked about various issues surrounding SSNs and he had to constantly respond "It wasn't meant for this, it wasn't built for it, it's not used in a consistent way that we could do that, and I'm not sure you want the Social Security administration to be in charge of that, that's not what we even do..."
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Indeed. Interestingly enough, they support Login.gov (a USDS/18F/GSA identity project) as an identity provider service [1] :) I keep poking government agencies who don't support it. Some are easier, some are harder. Some I have to go talk to legislators about appropriations to extend their applications to include the support. A necessary schlep. [1] https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Login.gov is shockingly well done. Multiple U2F keys, gives clear reasons why SMS is less optimal than U2F/TOTP, very clear flow.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        tyingq 5y ago
  - sonicggg 5y ago
    It was never meant to be used as such. Its adoption as an identifier is the worst "hack" I've seen. I hate how businesses trust it as sort of some password. It's ridiculous how much damage a scammer can do by using your SSN. Like it's a freaking plain text number. At this point it really should not be used for anything at all, and we should just assume that our SSN is public knowledge. I think we have the technology and means to come up with something better.
  - GeneralMayhem 5y ago
    Absolutely not. An SSN is at best a username. It's not a password. It doesn't even have a checksum in it - my library card number is is literally more secure than my SSN.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    We use it for identification because there’s no alternative. Hence the suggestion to create an alternative.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    What happens when someone hacks some government database and leaks the whole "first name - last name - ssn" datbase?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  We do need one, yes, but realistically we'd have to delay the requirements for presenting one until something like 99.9% of people could be shown to have been issued one. Otherwise it's not really fair and would be a huge lever for abuse. This always comes up with identification requirements for voting. It seems superficially reasonable to require them, especially if you are looking at it from abroad, or if you are pretty young. But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship. Unless and until every one of the fifty US states can demonstrate that they've put an ID card in the hands of virtually everybody, it won't be reasonable to condition things like education, health care, or voting on the possession of one.
  - mrits 5y ago
    For the people that can't prove they were born, how does a new ID card make it worse? It seems like it would make it better since the new system wouldn't be tied to birth ancient birth certificates or SS #s
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      It doesn't make it worse when you just issue IDs, but it would make it worse if you required them before they were virtually universal. Today the coverage of state IDs is actually very poor. People who hold them believe they are universally held but in truth only 89% of adult Americans possess one. That is not high, it is terrible.
    - InitialBP 5y ago
      In order to rollout a whole new ID system you'd need so way to validate the identity of the recipient before you gave them a new one. Presumably the easiest way would be just to turn in your old ID card, which many people don't have, per the previous comment.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        It's a gradient. People with existing identity docs are frictionless, state IDs, driver's licenses, passports. Heck, ID.me and Stripe Identity can proof these folks remotely. People without those docs still have birth certificates and other legacy identity docs. You use trust anchors and identity to proof them into new identity systems. The latter requires a solid and robust ground game, similar to USPS or the US census, to ensure extremely high rates of coverage to prevent disenfranchisement or a digital divide. (a component of my work is digital identity/IAM)
- notyourday 5y ago
  > This country badly needs a national ID system. Great! You have just solved the illegal immigration problem. So we are going to legalize everyone right here right now, correct?
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    The immigration problem is only related to the ID problem for those who have an agenda. They are separate issues.
    - notyourday 5y ago
      > The immigration problem is only related to the ID problem for those who have an agenda. They are separate issues. They are exactly the same issue. National ID only works if everyone inside the border has it -- regardless of how they managed to get there initially -- be that a person who due to whatever the weird way cannot get an ID as their records are messed up ( hello rural Appalachia ) or someone who is here illegally. After that t0 day the borders control and immigration control get teeth and anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country. Otherwise you have just created two different classes of people with a near impenetrable barrier between them
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        Or, we could start with giving a National ID to whoever currently has a Social Security card. That sidesteps the whole issue you’re describing and still solves the problem of how Social Security Numbers are not secret.
        notyourday 5y ago
        > Or, we could start with giving a National ID to whoever currently has a Social Security card. That sidesteps the whole issue you’re describing and still solves the problem of how Social Security Numbers are not secret. It does not because we fundamentally have enough fake social security numbers based identify theft to still create a two class system except this time there's zero guarantee that the person who should get the ID will have it and not his or hers "counterpart" My wife got IRS notification that she already filed taxes a few years ago when she attempted to file hers. It was because someone has been using her identity. That person did not get arrested. Rather there are now two people running around the country with her SSN - her and not her. Oh and they are still filing taxes as her. Year after year. She just needs to use a special code now to separate her return from an imposer return
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  I don't see how this helps at all in a remote setting. National ID numbers aren't private and could be stolen just as easily. Unless you truly have a national ID equivalent to like a Yubikey / 2-factor auth (I don't think anyone does) this just changes the implementation.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    Eh, I think the issue is that because there's no central system, every institution that needs to verify identity latches onto systems that were never intended for that purpose (such as ssn). The use of a bunch of different systems means that it'd hard to do simple things like verify that an applicant is actually a living person or that the same persons info isn't being used across multiple counties, states etc... Obviously there are a number of potential pitfalls in any such system, but I have to believe that even a flawed system which was intentionally designed would be harder to exploit than a hodgepodge of 100 incidental systems.
    - nickff 5y ago
      Won't any system as valuable as national ID be vulnerable to similar attacks as SSN? The problem seems to be that American ID is extremely valuable; it will suffer more attacks than almost any other national ID, just because of the sheer amount of money involved.
      - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        No, because a much better system could be designed if we planned on using it for id verification from the start. Some easy improvements even keeping a number based system would be: 1) don't assign ID numbers sequentially and based on location of birth 2) have consistent laws about who can collect these and liability for leaks (like hipaa) 3) allow them to be changed in cases of theft But we could actually do much better by using asymmetric cryptography.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    You don't hide the ID number, you show the card itself. In slovenia (and other former yugoslav countries) we have a unique ID for every person here.. It's set up from the date of birth (0101021 - 1. jan. 2021), then two digits for the foreign yugoslav state (50 for slovenia), then a tri-digit counter for each birth (first person born that day is 001, and so on), and one digit for the checksum, which can be easily calculated.... so basically, with a calculator and 2 minutes of typing in the numbers, you can calculate a valid ID number. But to open a bank account, you show the ID, which has any-copying measures (like money has), a photo, a serial number (to be cancelled if stolen), and only then the bank creates a new bank account for you. You can also use the same card to buy alcohol and travel through many european countries (no need for a passport).
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I'd go for stricter anti-money-laundering regulations and stiff penalties for executives of financial institutions that opt to take part of such schemes. If we severely punish a bank that looks the other way while someone opens an account using a stolen identity, I am very sure they'll work really hard to make that impossible. How hard they'll work depends on how severely they are punished.
  - ok123456 5y ago
    All the anti-money-laundering laws do is make it harder for everyone else except criminals. You're treated like a criminal simply by doing business in cash or having a lot of cash. Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. If you're living abroad, no one wants to let you open an account.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. are you saying this because of onlyfans? AFAIK that was due to pressure from banks/payment processors themselves (ie. not wanting the PR associated with facilitating human trafficking or whatever), not due to compliance reasons.
      - ok123456 5y ago
        No. Chase bank has always done this.
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        Not only this. Large cash transactions also raise red flags. There have been American politicians tripped up in sex scandals because of AML laws.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        Which, I guess, is a good thing. You don't want politicians to have such conflicts of interest. They can have as much sex as they want, they can pay as much as they want (as long as it's their money) for it, but the moment someone has a way to extort or otherwise force a politician to behave in a way that's illegal or against the interests of the people, I'd like that to be exposed.
giorgioz 5y ago
Was it Greendale Community College?
- giorgioz 5y ago
  reference joke to the tv show Community
nonameiguess 5y ago
There's at least one pretty fool proof way to defeat this specific kind of fraud. Give tuition waivers rather than grants. Or, of course, just charge less. I went to LA City 20 years ago. Had a bad experience unrelated to school itself at the first four-year I tried to attend and had to drop out. My parents couldn't actually afford to send me back, but the reported income was still over the threshold to get me enough aid to afford a four-year. So I started at a community college. It was $9 per credit hour at that point. Financial aid was not necessary. I just worked an overnight shift detailing the restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm theme park.
- AnotherGoodName 5y ago
  I had a fun situation where my university lecturer told me "Myself and other lecturers also work at the local community college teaching the same subjects, it costs $100 per semester there and you can transfer the credit across." So for at least the first year of university i spent almost nothing on tuition. Which was nice for someone who was really struggling back then.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    I discovered the strategy of testing out of subjects at the community college then transferring the credit to my university. This worked for many courses for which the university offered no credit by exam.
    - Enginerrrd 5y ago
      I've never understood why I encountered so much resistance to the concept of testing out of subjects during my academic career. I would have even paid for the units, I just didn't get why department heads were so opposed.
      - owly 5y ago
        Yeah. I was lucky enough to have one department head who agreed to testing out and was able to bypass two required courses. It doesn’t make much sense to require courses which the student has already mastered. Only reason is $$$.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students Well we all know what they'd be happy to tell us if they didn't. So by process of elimination...
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  They may have no clue.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  I'm guessing from the large number of fraudulent applications, a bunch of money was dispersed. Can anyone estimate how much? Did the system promise to give stipend checks to applicants?
  - gabereiser 5y ago
    Let's assume $4k in annual cost (avg) for a year of community college. Let's multiply that by 64,000 applicants. Let's assume only 50,000 actually were paid out as tuition grants (probably more, possibly all, but bare with me). That's $200m paid out. $256m if all were paid out.
- kova12 5y ago
  Also, I'm wondering what happened in the previous years? I wouldn't be surprised if a scam was ongoing for a while, but 64K applications ended up being a little too many. I also would be surprised if the scam is only happening in CA, and the other places just turn the blind eye on it
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'd be willing to bet this scam was covid related, that is, being able to go to school from home enabled this scale of fraud. It probably existed before that but wasn't too widespread. I'd also be willing to bet that other state systems would find similar situations if they checked their rolls, like you said.
quantumBerry 5y ago
Yes because the government has done a fantastic job using our money in a fiscally responsible manner for K-12; let's extend that even further in the collegiate system.
- vkou 5y ago
  You're right, it would be much better for our society if basic literacy, numeracy, and civics were gated behind whether or not your parents could be arsed to pay for it.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Local colleges handle it acceptably. State/Federal do not. Technical colleges in my state are funded by their cities tax payers primarily. They routinely have a much better graduation and lower drop out rating, as well as a more positive experience among students than the average university here. Many people like to point to the universities not getting funding but I call bullshit on that. Most of them blow all their money on sports arenas/facilities or pointless garbage to nickle and dime students. They don't care about your education. They just wanna milk you.
- digitaltrees 5y ago
  Yea let’s go back to life when most citizens didn’t get a primary school education let alone high school. You think 100% of families will prioritize tuition for toddlers when it’s a discretionary expense? Or will the bid up rent costs?
  - quantumBerry 5y ago
    I pay $1200 a month for my toddler's education and now you want me to pay more taxes for someone else's college? Or were you arguing against a straw man that I was talking about whether the public should fund K-12 at all? Public investment in collegiate system is already non-zero. Perhaps you've heard of them, they're called "public college" like "North Dakota State University." Do you understand where the "state" comes from? Which is why I made the statement about spending even more money, not whether we spend it at all. The US gets some of the poorest returns on K-12 education, and we need to get that sorted out before we look at funding the collegiate system further.
user3939382 5y ago
I ran a Federal FA school for years. You might be surprised to learn that this type of thing is actually fairly common. The DOE operates largely on the assumption that federal aid so-called drawdowns (G5 financial transfers) for tuition are made in good faith. They don't realize there's a problem unless or until there's a red flag, which is sometimes years after a school has been doing this.
shmatt 5y ago
The article seems very fuzzy around the difference between signing up vs. requesting financial aid sentences like > finding that 20% of recent traffic on its main portal for online applications was “malicious and bot-related,” > the fake applications are roiling the ability of college officials to determine true student enrollment numbers Fake enrollment is done, for another reason, to harvest .edu emails. There are websites that easily allow you to get such an address, that works to get some student perks (some websites giving student perks intentionally block certain community college domains, because they understood long ago the fraud going on). There are scripts to automate this (including DOB, they're complaining about 90 year olds signing up) on Github The harvesters then go and sell the accounts on eBay openly So I suspect this might be a subset of the fake sign ups, and they aren't really explaining how many of the suspected 20% bots actually officially filed for financial aid Here is an example of such a Github repo https://github.com/MrStark-XD/Edu-Mail-Generator https://github.com/MrStark-XD/Edu-Mail-Generator Use at your own risk, it literally just signs you up to community college with random information
- evilotto 5y ago
  All of that user's github repos are different tools for fraud.
datavirtue 5y ago
"California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students" In my state a reply like this will generate a sunshine request faster than you can bat an eye.
maunaloa 5y ago
Can someone explain how this money just disappears? It’s not like financial aid is disbursed via Monero. Wouldn’t these payments go through a bank via either wire transfer or a check? Seems like there should be a lot of potential threads to follow back to the perpetrators.
- ajhurliman 5y ago
  Step 1: Go buy personal information about people on the dark web Step 2: Setup bank accounts in their names at neo-banks with weak KYC/AML policies Step 3: Have money sent to these accounts where the actual named owner has no idea it exists and you hold a debit card to it. The only recourse you have at that point is to shut down the accounts and hope they haven't drained it completely. And that's if everyone is willing to play ball, there are countless bureaucrats in this process that can slow or stop it because it's extra work and they feel like their job isn't on the line if they ignore the request.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > neo-banks with weak KYC/AML policies It looks like banks need to be better regulated. This seems to be a solution to this and a whole lot other problems.
    - nickff 5y ago
      Banks are already very strictly regulated; I am not sure how they could be better regulated. Also, many of the regulations have more to do with ensuring complete taxation than helping account holders (as the government wants its money). Do you have any specific ideas? Perhaps there should be fewer requirements, but with more accountability?
    - luckylion 5y ago
      If they introduce better KYC, you pay naive people to be a "representative" for your company and tell them they get to keep 5% of any payment they forward. It's a pretty old trick. When it blows up, all you get is some naive person who says "but they even had a logo and sent me my own business cards" and a lot of money orders sent somewhere.
dboreham 5y ago
My brain wants it to be 65535 or perhaps 65536
rbanffy 5y ago
I would suspect a bug if it were exactly 65535 students.
- pacaro 5y ago
  or the bot script is using uint16
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/m408C https://archive.is/m408C
nikkinana 5y ago
As far as I'm concerned not only are they fake students, but fake Stalinist professors teaching fake ideology. And that's just China.
pelorat 5y ago
How are these thing even possible in a modern country like the USA? Why don't you tie things to your social security number, and why don't you just give every citizen a SN on birth?
leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
A common thing I saw when I was in a CC was students attending classes to a certain point, they would get a stipend from the financial aid office (I believe for books) after the add drop period. After that the people would just stop coming to the class. A month in it was a ghost town. Always on the initial gen Ed classes, not sure how long they kept that going for.
walrus01 5y ago
I'm curious what the cash-out method for the scam was supposed to be, if this had worked? I assume the scammers recruited a bunch of gullible 'money mule' people with US domestic bank accounts that could receive incoming ACH transfers. And would then socially engineer them into taking the out the money and sending most of it somewhere.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Fraud detection as a service for governments would seem to be a possible growth industry. While I understand that fraud numbers are not 'material' relative to the overall budgets here, I would expect it would be an "easy win" for politicians to help reduce the fraudulent use of taxpayer dollars. It seems to be Katie Porter's entire platform and it works well.
- julianapostate 5y ago
  they actually like the fraud because they can use it to justify larger budgets.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
Huge widespread systematic fraud in every single government program but definitely, certainly, absolutely not in voting. No systematic voting fraud ever happens. Ever.
fortran77 5y ago
I love community colleges, and I've taught at them. The solution for this problem is to make community college tuition zero. And build a lot more of them. Combine this with a reduction of government grants and student loans and we'll eliminate fraud and people getting into debt they can't pay--while still providing good education options for people without a lot of money.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  It works like that in France, the concept of tuition makes no sense for Universities. As a result we dont have brand unis like MIT or Caltech or Harvard but more importantly: you want to study you just need to find a way to sustain yourself, the uni is totally free. Now ofc poorer students have grants they can abuse for rent and food, and they do. But it's not the same amounts and can be distributed regularly along the year instead of in bulk. And studying in a small french uni, I found that "quality education" is mostly giving you time away from distraction to learn a craft, and the uni is a guide/facilitator, but you're doing the ground work. A terrible teacher can still nudge you towards the right books and focus your studies with exams and you can always compensate for their lack of clarity.
peter303 5y ago
Sort of like the so-called Afghan Army, where 80%-90% of soldiers were fake. Their commanders pocketed their salaries.
lanevorockz 5y ago
The system exists to be gamed
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insaneisnotfree 5y ago
I think this kind of fraud should be investigated and penalized

269 points by hbcondo714 5y ago

1-6 5y ago

Whoever gets caught will probably get a slap on the wrist.

bpodgursky 5y ago
If it's anything like the CA UI benefit scams, the money is mostly going abroad to organized crime in Nigeria, Russia etc. Edit: guys... it's literally true. Come on https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/international-fraud-ring-steals-billions-in-edd-money-from-california/ https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/international-fra....
evilotto 5y ago
Or the system (laws or computers, take your pick) will be updated to make it harder to get assistance which will impact the individuals who genuinely need it while not having much of an impact on the massive organized fraud operations.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

This country badly needs a national ID system.

jimbob45 5y ago
Does the SSN not mostly fulfill that need? Edit: The SSN seems a lot like JavaScript at this point. Y'all are talking about how you would never use it for anything and yet it's the one thing everyone is using for identity verification these days.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  No, it doesn't. It's not meant as a secure identifier and it doesn't provide for identity proofing. A national ID systems, as only_as_i_fall stated, is required. A previous comment I wrote on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851 Someone in the trenches wrote about it: https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-solve-identity-once-and-for-all https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-...
  - duxup 5y ago
    I recall an interview with someone in charge of the Social Security Administration about how they were constantly asked about various issues surrounding SSNs and he had to constantly respond "It wasn't meant for this, it wasn't built for it, it's not used in a consistent way that we could do that, and I'm not sure you want the Social Security administration to be in charge of that, that's not what we even do..."
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Indeed. Interestingly enough, they support Login.gov (a USDS/18F/GSA identity project) as an identity provider service [1] :) I keep poking government agencies who don't support it. Some are easier, some are harder. Some I have to go talk to legislators about appropriations to extend their applications to include the support. A necessary schlep. [1] https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Login.gov is shockingly well done. Multiple U2F keys, gives clear reasons why SMS is less optimal than U2F/TOTP, very clear flow.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        tyingq 5y ago
- sonicggg 5y ago
  It was never meant to be used as such. Its adoption as an identifier is the worst "hack" I've seen. I hate how businesses trust it as sort of some password. It's ridiculous how much damage a scammer can do by using your SSN. Like it's a freaking plain text number. At this point it really should not be used for anything at all, and we should just assume that our SSN is public knowledge. I think we have the technology and means to come up with something better.
- GeneralMayhem 5y ago
  Absolutely not. An SSN is at best a username. It's not a password. It doesn't even have a checksum in it - my library card number is is literally more secure than my SSN.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  We use it for identification because there’s no alternative. Hence the suggestion to create an alternative.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  What happens when someone hacks some government database and leaks the whole "first name - last name - ssn" datbase?
jeffbee 5y ago
We do need one, yes, but realistically we'd have to delay the requirements for presenting one until something like 99.9% of people could be shown to have been issued one. Otherwise it's not really fair and would be a huge lever for abuse. This always comes up with identification requirements for voting. It seems superficially reasonable to require them, especially if you are looking at it from abroad, or if you are pretty young. But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship. Unless and until every one of the fifty US states can demonstrate that they've put an ID card in the hands of virtually everybody, it won't be reasonable to condition things like education, health care, or voting on the possession of one.
- mrits 5y ago
  For the people that can't prove they were born, how does a new ID card make it worse? It seems like it would make it better since the new system wouldn't be tied to birth ancient birth certificates or SS #s
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    It doesn't make it worse when you just issue IDs, but it would make it worse if you required them before they were virtually universal. Today the coverage of state IDs is actually very poor. People who hold them believe they are universally held but in truth only 89% of adult Americans possess one. That is not high, it is terrible.
  - InitialBP 5y ago
    In order to rollout a whole new ID system you'd need so way to validate the identity of the recipient before you gave them a new one. Presumably the easiest way would be just to turn in your old ID card, which many people don't have, per the previous comment.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      It's a gradient. People with existing identity docs are frictionless, state IDs, driver's licenses, passports. Heck, ID.me and Stripe Identity can proof these folks remotely. People without those docs still have birth certificates and other legacy identity docs. You use trust anchors and identity to proof them into new identity systems. The latter requires a solid and robust ground game, similar to USPS or the US census, to ensure extremely high rates of coverage to prevent disenfranchisement or a digital divide. (a component of my work is digital identity/IAM)
notyourday 5y ago
> This country badly needs a national ID system. Great! You have just solved the illegal immigration problem. So we are going to legalize everyone right here right now, correct?
- ironmagma 5y ago
  The immigration problem is only related to the ID problem for those who have an agenda. They are separate issues.
  - notyourday 5y ago
    > The immigration problem is only related to the ID problem for those who have an agenda. They are separate issues. They are exactly the same issue. National ID only works if everyone inside the border has it -- regardless of how they managed to get there initially -- be that a person who due to whatever the weird way cannot get an ID as their records are messed up ( hello rural Appalachia ) or someone who is here illegally. After that t0 day the borders control and immigration control get teeth and anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country. Otherwise you have just created two different classes of people with a near impenetrable barrier between them
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      Or, we could start with giving a National ID to whoever currently has a Social Security card. That sidesteps the whole issue you’re describing and still solves the problem of how Social Security Numbers are not secret.
      - notyourday 5y ago
        > Or, we could start with giving a National ID to whoever currently has a Social Security card. That sidesteps the whole issue you’re describing and still solves the problem of how Social Security Numbers are not secret. It does not because we fundamentally have enough fake social security numbers based identify theft to still create a two class system except this time there's zero guarantee that the person who should get the ID will have it and not his or hers "counterpart" My wife got IRS notification that she already filed taxes a few years ago when she attempted to file hers. It was because someone has been using her identity. That person did not get arrested. Rather there are now two people running around the country with her SSN - her and not her. Oh and they are still filing taxes as her. Year after year. She just needs to use a special code now to separate her return from an imposer return
bpodgursky 5y ago
I don't see how this helps at all in a remote setting. National ID numbers aren't private and could be stolen just as easily. Unless you truly have a national ID equivalent to like a Yubikey / 2-factor auth (I don't think anyone does) this just changes the implementation.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Eh, I think the issue is that because there's no central system, every institution that needs to verify identity latches onto systems that were never intended for that purpose (such as ssn). The use of a bunch of different systems means that it'd hard to do simple things like verify that an applicant is actually a living person or that the same persons info isn't being used across multiple counties, states etc... Obviously there are a number of potential pitfalls in any such system, but I have to believe that even a flawed system which was intentionally designed would be harder to exploit than a hodgepodge of 100 incidental systems.
  - nickff 5y ago
    Won't any system as valuable as national ID be vulnerable to similar attacks as SSN? The problem seems to be that American ID is extremely valuable; it will suffer more attacks than almost any other national ID, just because of the sheer amount of money involved.
    - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      No, because a much better system could be designed if we planned on using it for id verification from the start. Some easy improvements even keeping a number based system would be: 1) don't assign ID numbers sequentially and based on location of birth 2) have consistent laws about who can collect these and liability for leaks (like hipaa) 3) allow them to be changed in cases of theft But we could actually do much better by using asymmetric cryptography.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  You don't hide the ID number, you show the card itself. In slovenia (and other former yugoslav countries) we have a unique ID for every person here.. It's set up from the date of birth (0101021 - 1. jan. 2021), then two digits for the foreign yugoslav state (50 for slovenia), then a tri-digit counter for each birth (first person born that day is 001, and so on), and one digit for the checksum, which can be easily calculated.... so basically, with a calculator and 2 minutes of typing in the numbers, you can calculate a valid ID number. But to open a bank account, you show the ID, which has any-copying measures (like money has), a photo, a serial number (to be cancelled if stolen), and only then the bank creates a new bank account for you. You can also use the same card to buy alcohol and travel through many european countries (no need for a passport).
rbanffy 5y ago
I'd go for stricter anti-money-laundering regulations and stiff penalties for executives of financial institutions that opt to take part of such schemes. If we severely punish a bank that looks the other way while someone opens an account using a stolen identity, I am very sure they'll work really hard to make that impossible. How hard they'll work depends on how severely they are punished.
- ok123456 5y ago
  All the anti-money-laundering laws do is make it harder for everyone else except criminals. You're treated like a criminal simply by doing business in cash or having a lot of cash. Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. If you're living abroad, no one wants to let you open an account.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. are you saying this because of onlyfans? AFAIK that was due to pressure from banks/payment processors themselves (ie. not wanting the PR associated with facilitating human trafficking or whatever), not due to compliance reasons.
    - ok123456 5y ago
      No. Chase bank has always done this.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Not only this. Large cash transactions also raise red flags. There have been American politicians tripped up in sex scandals because of AML laws.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Which, I guess, is a good thing. You don't want politicians to have such conflicts of interest. They can have as much sex as they want, they can pay as much as they want (as long as it's their money) for it, but the moment someone has a way to extort or otherwise force a politician to behave in a way that's illegal or against the interests of the people, I'd like that to be exposed.

giorgioz 5y ago

Was it Greendale Community College?

giorgioz 5y ago
reference joke to the tv show Community

nonameiguess 5y ago

There's at least one pretty fool proof way to defeat this specific kind of fraud. Give tuition waivers rather than grants. Or, of course, just charge less. I went to LA City 20 years ago. Had a bad experience unrelated to school itself at the first four-year I tried to attend and had to drop out. My parents couldn't actually afford to send me back, but the reported income was still over the threshold to get me enough aid to afford a four-year. So I started at a community college. It was $9 per credit hour at that point. Financial aid was not necessary. I just worked an overnight shift detailing the restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm theme park.

AnotherGoodName 5y ago
I had a fun situation where my university lecturer told me "Myself and other lecturers also work at the local community college teaching the same subjects, it costs $100 per semester there and you can transfer the credit across." So for at least the first year of university i spent almost nothing on tuition. Which was nice for someone who was really struggling back then.
- thebean11 5y ago
  I discovered the strategy of testing out of subjects at the community college then transferring the credit to my university. This worked for many courses for which the university offered no credit by exam.
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    I've never understood why I encountered so much resistance to the concept of testing out of subjects during my academic career. I would have even paid for the units, I just didn't get why department heads were so opposed.
    - owly 5y ago
      Yeah. I was lucky enough to have one department head who agreed to testing out and was able to bypass two required courses. It doesn’t make much sense to require courses which the student has already mastered. Only reason is $$$.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students Well we all know what they'd be happy to tell us if they didn't. So by process of elimination...

LadyCailin 5y ago
They may have no clue.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
I'm guessing from the large number of fraudulent applications, a bunch of money was dispersed. Can anyone estimate how much? Did the system promise to give stipend checks to applicants?
- gabereiser 5y ago
  Let's assume $4k in annual cost (avg) for a year of community college. Let's multiply that by 64,000 applicants. Let's assume only 50,000 actually were paid out as tuition grants (probably more, possibly all, but bare with me). That's $200m paid out. $256m if all were paid out.
kova12 5y ago
Also, I'm wondering what happened in the previous years? I wouldn't be surprised if a scam was ongoing for a while, but 64K applications ended up being a little too many. I also would be surprised if the scam is only happening in CA, and the other places just turn the blind eye on it
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'd be willing to bet this scam was covid related, that is, being able to go to school from home enabled this scale of fraud. It probably existed before that but wasn't too widespread. I'd also be willing to bet that other state systems would find similar situations if they checked their rolls, like you said.

quantumBerry 5y ago

Yes because the government has done a fantastic job using our money in a fiscally responsible manner for K-12; let's extend that even further in the collegiate system.

vkou 5y ago
You're right, it would be much better for our society if basic literacy, numeracy, and civics were gated behind whether or not your parents could be arsed to pay for it.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Local colleges handle it acceptably. State/Federal do not. Technical colleges in my state are funded by their cities tax payers primarily. They routinely have a much better graduation and lower drop out rating, as well as a more positive experience among students than the average university here. Many people like to point to the universities not getting funding but I call bullshit on that. Most of them blow all their money on sports arenas/facilities or pointless garbage to nickle and dime students. They don't care about your education. They just wanna milk you.
digitaltrees 5y ago
Yea let’s go back to life when most citizens didn’t get a primary school education let alone high school. You think 100% of families will prioritize tuition for toddlers when it’s a discretionary expense? Or will the bid up rent costs?
- quantumBerry 5y ago
  I pay $1200 a month for my toddler's education and now you want me to pay more taxes for someone else's college? Or were you arguing against a straw man that I was talking about whether the public should fund K-12 at all? Public investment in collegiate system is already non-zero. Perhaps you've heard of them, they're called "public college" like "North Dakota State University." Do you understand where the "state" comes from? Which is why I made the statement about spending even more money, not whether we spend it at all. The US gets some of the poorest returns on K-12 education, and we need to get that sorted out before we look at funding the collegiate system further.

user3939382 5y ago

I ran a Federal FA school for years. You might be surprised to learn that this type of thing is actually fairly common. The DOE operates largely on the assumption that federal aid so-called drawdowns (G5 financial transfers) for tuition are made in good faith. They don't realize there's a problem unless or until there's a red flag, which is sometimes years after a school has been doing this.

shmatt 5y ago

The article seems very fuzzy around the difference between signing up vs. requesting financial aid sentences like > finding that 20% of recent traffic on its main portal for online applications was “malicious and bot-related,” > the fake applications are roiling the ability of college officials to determine true student enrollment numbers Fake enrollment is done, for another reason, to harvest .edu emails. There are websites that easily allow you to get such an address, that works to get some student perks (some websites giving student perks intentionally block certain community college domains, because they understood long ago the fraud going on). There are scripts to automate this (including DOB, they're complaining about 90 year olds signing up) on Github The harvesters then go and sell the accounts on eBay openly So I suspect this might be a subset of the fake sign ups, and they aren't really explaining how many of the suspected 20% bots actually officially filed for financial aid Here is an example of such a Github repo https://github.com/MrStark-XD/Edu-Mail-Generator https://github.com/MrStark-XD/Edu-Mail-Generator Use at your own risk, it literally just signs you up to community college with random information

evilotto 5y ago
All of that user's github repos are different tools for fraud.

datavirtue 5y ago

"California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students" In my state a reply like this will generate a sunshine request faster than you can bat an eye.

maunaloa 5y ago

Can someone explain how this money just disappears? It’s not like financial aid is disbursed via Monero. Wouldn’t these payments go through a bank via either wire transfer or a check? Seems like there should be a lot of potential threads to follow back to the perpetrators.

ajhurliman 5y ago
Step 1: Go buy personal information about people on the dark web Step 2: Setup bank accounts in their names at neo-banks with weak KYC/AML policies Step 3: Have money sent to these accounts where the actual named owner has no idea it exists and you hold a debit card to it. The only recourse you have at that point is to shut down the accounts and hope they haven't drained it completely. And that's if everyone is willing to play ball, there are countless bureaucrats in this process that can slow or stop it because it's extra work and they feel like their job isn't on the line if they ignore the request.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > neo-banks with weak KYC/AML policies It looks like banks need to be better regulated. This seems to be a solution to this and a whole lot other problems.
  - nickff 5y ago
    Banks are already very strictly regulated; I am not sure how they could be better regulated. Also, many of the regulations have more to do with ensuring complete taxation than helping account holders (as the government wants its money). Do you have any specific ideas? Perhaps there should be fewer requirements, but with more accountability?
  - luckylion 5y ago
    If they introduce better KYC, you pay naive people to be a "representative" for your company and tell them they get to keep 5% of any payment they forward. It's a pretty old trick. When it blows up, all you get is some naive person who says "but they even had a logo and sent me my own business cards" and a lot of money orders sent somewhere.

dboreham 5y ago

My brain wants it to be 65535 or perhaps 65536

rbanffy 5y ago

I would suspect a bug if it were exactly 65535 students.

pacaro 5y ago
or the bot script is using uint16

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/m408C https://archive.is/m408C

nikkinana 5y ago

As far as I'm concerned not only are they fake students, but fake Stalinist professors teaching fake ideology. And that's just China.

pelorat 5y ago

How are these thing even possible in a modern country like the USA? Why don't you tie things to your social security number, and why don't you just give every citizen a SN on birth?

leeroyjenkins11 5y ago

A common thing I saw when I was in a CC was students attending classes to a certain point, they would get a stipend from the financial aid office (I believe for books) after the add drop period. After that the people would just stop coming to the class. A month in it was a ghost town. Always on the initial gen Ed classes, not sure how long they kept that going for.

walrus01 5y ago

I'm curious what the cash-out method for the scam was supposed to be, if this had worked? I assume the scammers recruited a bunch of gullible 'money mule' people with US domestic bank accounts that could receive incoming ACH transfers. And would then socially engineer them into taking the out the money and sending most of it somewhere.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Fraud detection as a service for governments would seem to be a possible growth industry. While I understand that fraud numbers are not 'material' relative to the overall budgets here, I would expect it would be an "easy win" for politicians to help reduce the fraudulent use of taxpayer dollars. It seems to be Katie Porter's entire platform and it works well.

julianapostate 5y ago
they actually like the fraud because they can use it to justify larger budgets.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

Huge widespread systematic fraud in every single government program but definitely, certainly, absolutely not in voting. No systematic voting fraud ever happens. Ever.

fortran77 5y ago

I love community colleges, and I've taught at them. The solution for this problem is to make community college tuition zero. And build a lot more of them. Combine this with a reduction of government grants and student loans and we'll eliminate fraud and people getting into debt they can't pay--while still providing good education options for people without a lot of money.

secondaryacct 5y ago
It works like that in France, the concept of tuition makes no sense for Universities. As a result we dont have brand unis like MIT or Caltech or Harvard but more importantly: you want to study you just need to find a way to sustain yourself, the uni is totally free. Now ofc poorer students have grants they can abuse for rent and food, and they do. But it's not the same amounts and can be distributed regularly along the year instead of in bulk. And studying in a small french uni, I found that "quality education" is mostly giving you time away from distraction to learn a craft, and the uni is a guide/facilitator, but you're doing the ground work. A terrible teacher can still nudge you towards the right books and focus your studies with exams and you can always compensate for their lack of clarity.

peter303 5y ago

Sort of like the so-called Afghan Army, where 80%-90% of soldiers were fake. Their commanders pocketed their salaries.

lanevorockz 5y ago

The system exists to be gamed

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insaneisnotfree 5y ago

I think this kind of fraud should be investigated and penalized