AFN has reported that "ghost students" are plaguing some U.S. campuses in high numbers; loans scammers reportedly obtain financial aid by enrolling in online classes with fake IDs and forms.
The $150 million the Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon have flagged in recent months adds to the $1 billion in student aid officials blocked in 2025 from going to such "students."
Andrew Ferguson, vice-chair of the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, recently told Fox News, "We have turned education in this country into a piggy bank for the worst people you can imagine, and the Biden administration did nothing about this!"
He did not specifically say if all the $150 million was due to ghost students or involved other types of fraud as well.
At a House education hearing "Examining the Policies and Priorities of the Department of Education" in May, Rep. James Comer, (R-Kentucky) and Sec. McMahon discussed the steps the department was taking to prevent fraudulent payments from going to scammers.
She attributed the advancements to the redesign of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) portal and the requirement that high-risk applicants provide government-issued identification before accessing federal student aid, including Pell Grants and loans.
"We started identifying with these flags that these people weren't who they said they were," McMahon relayed at the hearing. "They were bots that had been going online not only in this country, but outside of this country as well, these sort of rings were being operated. So, we saw that, and we were able then to stop these loans, these payments from going out for these applications."
The College Fix notes that Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) has also introduced legislation "to require the use of fraud detection systems in FAFSA applications to spot and block the approval of fraudulent applications.
