What Is 'Ghost Student' Scam Troubling US Colleges

After businesses and companies, schools and colleges have become top targets for scammers. Some of them include scholarship scams, employment, and student loan debt relief frauds. Adding to these scams is a new 'ghost student' scam that has been circulating in a few US colleges. Fraudsters of these scams pose as real students who need financial support but end up not attending college or school. This is causing problems for college authorities and for genuine students who need help. Let's explore how Eastern Iowa colleges came up with a solution to dodge these scams and save their students. 

As colleges and universities have to deal with fund crunch a scam can bring additional burden. Scammers are trying to defraud these institutions with the 'ghost student' scam. To put it in simple words, a ghost student is an imposter applying for financial assistance from colleges using fake identities. The scammers act like real students who need financial support but they plan on not attending the university and flee with the assistance money. Eastern Iowa colleges have recently seen an increasing number of such cases and have alerted other universities to remain safe from such scammers.

The scam trend is not new for Kirkwood Community College as they have been witnessing such cases. Matt Falduto, the Senior Director of Financial Aid at the college is keeping an eye on such fraudsters and their applications. Falduto revealed that he had been seeing such cases and 100 such applications looked like fraud.

Falduto has taken the responsibility of catching or stopping these scammers and ensuring that actual students who are in dire need of financial help get the benefits. To curb this situation, the colleges have installed verification systems that each student has to pass to qualify for financial aid. Students have to show up at the college and have a face-to-face conversation with Falduto.

But the scammers who act like students want to do this whole process online says Falduto. This is one major point that differentiates the ghost students from the genuine ones. He further says that the practice of ghost students has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as everything went online from attending classes to getting degrees. "Making and following a process to identify ghost students can be tiring and time-consuming, but it saves our real students", says Falduto.

Using various scamming methods to steal the financial support saved for genuine students is spreading from the USA to countries like Canada and Australia. Falduto, along with other authorities hopes that their student identification systems and processes will deter the scammers and reduce the threat to the students. After catching more than 100 ghost student faces, the director proudly says that all these processes are just formulated to secure genuine students' futures.