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

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