Scammers use AI to run fake students through colleges for aid money

Scammers are enrolling fake students at US community colleges and using AI tools to complete their coursework, then collecting the students' financial aid disbursements. A history professor quoted in the reporting questions how much of the underlying cheating problem existed before AI made it easier.

Why it matters: This is a concrete case of AI lowering the cost of an existing fraud pattern (ghost-student financial aid schemes) rather than creating a new one, which is a useful template for where AI-enabled fraud shows up next: any process that verifies presence or effort rather than identity. It also pressures colleges' financial aid verification processes, which were built for a world without cheap synthetic coursework.