(NEW YORK) -- Murat Mayor has no need for an associate's degree. The 58-year-old business analyst already has a Ph.D. But when he and his son, a high school senior, attempted last fall to apply for federal student financial aid, they learned that an account associated with both of their identities already existed.
Those accounts showed applications to multiple community colleges -- and much more.
"We noticed that there [was] a lot of activity" on accounts created in their names, Mayor said in an interview with ABC News. "There are a lot of applications, loan applications, grant applications ... then we panicked."
Mayor knew immediately that something was amiss. He assumed his identity had been stolen. But he had no concept of the breadth of the scheme that had ensnared his and his son's identity, and he had certainly never heard of the army of digital fraudsters perpetrating the crime.
'A huge issue'
They are known as "ghost students," and for thousands of colleges across the country, these sophisticated thieves have a become a scourge. The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money -- robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims like Mayor and his son in their wake.
"It's a huge issue," said Jason Williams, the assistant inspector general for investigations at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General. "As they're stealing identities ... these loans are not being repaid. They're being assigned to people [who] don't even know they have a debt with U.S. Department of Education ... [until] the Internal Revenue Service says you owe the Department of Education money."
Fraudsters have attempted to steal student financial aid for decades, Williams said. But "when the pandemic [hit], everybody went to online learning. Well, by doing that, it really did open the door" for more widespread fraud, said Williams.
Scammers have realized that the move to remote learning at community colleges provides an opportunity to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to expand their reach and circumvent identity verification controls. Almost overnight, experts said, the fraud grew exponentially.
Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by "ghost student" schemes, Williams said. "And that's only in the universe of what we know, and what we have adjudicated," he added. "There's a lot of stuff that we don't know that's out there."
Williams said his office has more than 200 investigations open nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains.
Open season on open enrollment
The federal government is on the hook for tuition aid lost to scammers. But it is the community colleges, which accept almost all applicants through open enrollment, that often carry the burden of sniffing out fake applications. And doing so requires the resources, technology and expertise that many institutions do not possess.
Experts say the scope of the fraud is enormous. In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state's administrative body for the community college system.
Similar figures exist across the country. ABC News and its nationwide network of owned and operated stations investigated the rise of "ghost students" and found that almost no community college has been spared.
Gina Macklin, a senior administrator at Delaware County Community College, told WPVI-TV in Philadelphia that the school found more than 500 fake students enrolled in its classes in 2023, which she described as "a terrible year" for the school, not least of which because those fraudsters "had taken seats from legitimate students."
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those "students" were real people trying to get an education.
"The rest were fraudulent accounts," she said. "Ghost students."
Software solutions
The Trump administration last year implemented enhanced fraud controls and identity verification requirements for schools, which experts say helped schools combat fake applicants. But to help root out the fraud, many community colleges have turned to a growing marketplace of identity verification software vendors.
Maurice Simpkins, a retired NFL linebacker, operates one such business. His software is called Student Application Fraudulent Examination, or S.A.F.E.
The platform acts as a firewall for the schools, Simpkins said. "From a football term," he likes to say, "it's an offensive line." He says it catches around 95% of fake applications instantaneously and refers more to the school for additional scrutiny. After just two years on the market, S.A.F.E. is in use in more than 150 schools nationwide, he said.
Administrators at more than a dozen community colleges characterized the rise of "ghost students" as a true crisis. The fraudsters, those administrators say, are taking advantage of a vulnerability created by the degree to which these schools are accessible to students.
Officials say the scammers' schemes range from the savvy to the sloppy -- and all are brazen. One school administrator at a midwestern community college who asked not to be identified shared a "business proposal" he said he received last year from an alleged scammer.
In an email, the alleged scammer, who identified themselves as "Ken from Tanzania," offered to pay the administrator a share of the proceeds for his help in perpetrating the fraud. "I would really like us to partner and work for 3semesters [sic] and we get something good for us and our families."
Scammers who operate from overseas present a special challenge, according to investigators. But many of the "ghost students" operate within U.S. borders.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.
Murat Mayor, the 58-year-old business analyst, believes he and his son had their identities stolen as part of a massive hack of their health care provider in 2024. After months of back-and-forth with law enforcement and administrators at community colleges in Maryland and Utah, he finally cleared himself and his son from enrollment records earlier this month.
"He's a straight-A student, has been very successful -- an honor student, so he's doing well," Mayor told ABC News regarding his son.
Mayor's son has applied to study business finance in the fall. And this time, it will really be him.