Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to real estate course, Pugh said, she'd normally drop three to five from her roster who don't start the course or make contact with her at the start of the semester. But during the current spring semester, she said, that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It's a strange new reality that has left her baffled.
"It's really unclear to me, and beyond the scope of my knowledge, how this is really happening," she said. "Is it organized crime? Is it something else? Everybody has lots of theories."
Some of the disengaged students in Pugh's courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are "ghost students," and they've been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These "ghost students" are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual people. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and "frustrating" task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who's a real person.
The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching real students.
"I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible," Pugh said. "That included making phone calls to people, sending email messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out 'Are you just overwhelmed at work and haven't gotten around to starting the class yet? Or are you not a real person?'"
SCOPE OF THE STUDENT BOTS
Financial aid fraud is not new, but it's been on the rise in California's community colleges, CalMatters reported, with scammers stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount in 2023.
A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office directed SFGATE to a Public Records Request Act request to obtain the exact numbers. However, the office estimates that 0.21 percent of the system's financial aid was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said. The chancellor's office was unable to estimate the percentage of fraudulent attempts attributed to bots.
"Bots don't act on their own; there is almost always a human behind it," the spokesperson said in an email.
Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges and a professor at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, told SFGATE the bots have been enrolling in courses since around early 2021.
"It's been going on for quite some time," she said. "I think the reason that you're hearing more about it is that it's getting harder and harder to combat or to deal with."
Brill-Wynkoop said that when she first noticed the problem, it was because her course roster had student ID numbers that were all abnormally in sequential order. And then when classes would start, those suspicious "students" wouldn't show up or interact at all over email, she said. Some of the fraudsters have even been able to complete some coursework, such as introductory discussion posts, making it harder to tell who's real.
"I have heard from faculty friends that the bots are getting so smart, they're being programmed in a way that they can even complete some of the initial assignments in online classes so that they're not dropped by [the deadline to drop the class]," she said.
John Hetts, the community college system's executive vice chancellor for research, analytics and data, told SFGATE the fake students cause more problems beyond taking funds earmarked for people who really need them. The bots also increase the workload for faculty members and make it harder for real students to enroll in courses. Though he describes the numbers of bots as small, he said any reported number represents only the attempts that have been detected and stopped.
"What's happening is we have a very small proportion of students, or individuals, who have made their way through a gauntlet of tests," Hetts said.
AN 'AGONIZING' PROBLEM
Distinguishing real students from fake ones is a "fraught process" for professors, Pugh said.
"It's pretty agonizing, because you don't want to eliminate, you don't want to drop a real person," Pugh said. "It's a difficult responsibility when the system ends up having faculty be the ones to try to do that screening like that, feels like a failure to adequately address the problem."
In the 2024 calendar year, the chancellor's office estimates that 31.4 percent of its college applications were fraudulent, a spokesperson for the office told SFGATE. The chancellor's office also considers it fraudulent both to apply to a college with no intention of attending any institution and to enroll in a college with no intention of actually showing up. Financial aid fraud, or "the act of attempting to collect financial aid to which the applicant is not legally entitled," is the third step in the process and the most sophisticated.
"There's always been this opportunity to occur by attending an institution long enough to claim financial aid," Hetts said. "What [COVID-19] did is, because now you didn't have to have a person that had to physically show up, it created this opportunity — it changed the opportunity."
Since the bot student problem has escalated, the college system has implemented additional verification tools for student enrollment, Hetts said, such as ID.me, an online multifactor authentication tool. The chancellor's office has even issued memos to faculty and staff to help them identify bots. (Hetts said the chancellor's office is unable to speak on specifics of the tools.)
The problem now, though, is that the perpetrators are becoming better at committing fraud as AI continues to accelerate, making it difficult for colleges to keep up.
"We stop more, and then they discover new techniques and become more sophisticated over time, and so we have to constantly pivot," Hetts said.
'THEY FIND A WORKAROUND'
Other college officials expressed similar sentiments, saying AI technology is moving too fast. Nicole Albo-Lopez, deputy chancellor and professor of the Los Angeles Community College District, told SFGATE that her district was hit hard because it's the largest in the state, with nine colleges. At one point, the demographics of her institutions completely shifted within a week, she said.
"We are primarily Hispanic-serving institutions, and within a very short time frame, one of my colleges became predominantly white, and there was just no way with our demographics that that was true," Albo-Lopez said. "So we all kind of didn't sleep until we figured out what was going on."
As the district became more familiar with bots, she said, it's changed many of its processes, but fake students remain a top problem.
"Every time we have a fix, they find a workaround," she said. "This is something that's never going to go away. This is going to be part of our work, and we'll have to continue to monitor our processes and our policies and adapt alongside them."
Keeping up with AI tools and cybersecurity defenses can also get expensive. According to the chancellor's office, the college system has already invested in fraud monitoring and mitigation, which includes measures like upgrading the CCCApply application. The 2022-2023 budget provided $100 million for "technology and information security purposes," with $75 million being one-time funds and $25 million being ongoing, a chancellor's spokesperson said.
And with general attacks on higher education funding from the federal government, colleges will have to keep putting more resources into the problem, according to Nick Merrill, a cybersecurity researcher at UC Berkeley.
"I don't really know how we're going to work our way out of this really serious investment, but I hope that when push comes to shove, we get that investment and not like 'Sorry, we're cutting the budget of community colleges again,'" Merrill said.
DESPERATE CALL FOR INVESTMENTS
Merrill said a problem with creating a cybersecurity defense is that oftentimes experts don't know how the attackers are committing fraud, or they don't find out it's being committed until much later. To navigate college applications, the fraudsters are likely using software such as Claude AI, a conversational AI tool, or Manus, another autonomous AI agent that can perform online tasks. In some cases, scammers could even be using other people's identities, he added.
"On these dark web, or these places where the hackers kind of hang out, it's not terribly expensive to pay for an IP address that originates from whatever place you want it to originate from," Merrill said.
It's also hard to know who's responsible for the fraud, whether it's a group of "random teenagers" or an organized crime ring, he said, but it's important to recognize that current AI tools are far beyond ChatGPT's ability to just "cheat on homework," for example.
"I don't think [people] understand that there are tools that are fully autonomous today," Merrill said. "You can just be like 'please apply to this community college, fill out the forms however you need to fill them out, and once you're in there, do the homework,' and the agent can just fully do that, without any human supervision or intervention. And you can spin up five of those for not that much money."
Both Merrill and Vrajesh Bhavsar, co-founder of San Francisco tech startup Operant AI, told SFGATE they believe pulling off the college fraud scheme is not hard.
"These processes that these community colleges or other organizations have been using, there are a lot of standard, open-ended questions or forms that are easily shareable with LLMs [large language models] and you can create simple workflows," Bhavsar said.
Merrill said he is "very concerned" about how fast the AI tools are moving, and it's important for industries to establish different proof-of-personhood systems.
"It's a really serious issue," he said. "The world's going to get very, very weird within the next couple of years, and people are not ready for it."
As Pugh continues navigating the bot students each semester, she hopes administrators put more resources into stopping the fraudsters before they make it into the classroom.
In the meantime, Pugh advises students go back to the "old-fashioned" method of showing up in person on the first day of class if they weren't able to get in.
"I want our educational resources to be available to the people who want them — who are real people," she said.
© 2025 SFGate, San Francisco. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
