A new report from government watchdog OpenTheBooks reveals that sophisticated “ghost student” fraud continues to plague California’s community colleges, with one professor uncovering a case where fraudsters used the identity of a young man who died in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to fraudulently collect financial aid.
Kim Rich, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College in the Los Angeles Community College District, has been independently flagging fake student enrollments for years. Her efforts underscore a crisis that, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s recent national estimate, could be costing taxpayers $1 billion annually.
The most disturbing discovery by Professor Rich involved a fake student who was enrolled in a class and receiving financial aid using the name, photo, and date of birth of a 24-year-old victim who perished in the World Trade Center’s North Tower. “It broke my heart, and it pi–ed me off,” Rich told OpenTheBooks. She also found another fake account using the identity of a foreign executive.
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The sheer scale of the fraud in California appears to be vastly underestimated by state officials. The California Community College Chancellor’s Office claims that from March 2024 to March 2025, they tracked roughly $10 million in federal and $3 million in state financial aid fraud—figures the office contends are “nanoscopic” compared to the billions of dollars in total aid disbursed.
However, Professor Rich’s class rosters tell a different story. In the spring 2025 semester, 24 out of 40 students in one of her online classes were fake, with some accounts traced to overseas criminal enterprises, including Kenya.
“If I can go through my rosters and eliminate 50 [percent] of my class, I can’t be the only class in the entire college this is happening to,” Rich said. She conservatively estimates that fraud in the nine-college Los Angeles Community College District alone could total $20 million in a single semester if just one fake student per online class were to collect the average federal grant award.
Beyond the money, the fraud is actively harming genuine students by occupying desperately needed class seats. When Rich removes the fake enrollments, the seats open up, but by then, real students may have moved on to other courses.
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The report highlights that enrolling in California’s system is remarkably easy, often requiring little more than an online application with unverified personal information. The simple process allows for the mass creation of fraudulent accounts using obviously fictional details like duplicate names, question marks, and sequentially numbered student IDs.
State and federal lawmakers have begun to pressure officials for action. Nine members of California’s congressional delegation sent an April 2025 letter to Secretary McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi, demanding a “transparent and independent investigation” into what they called a “major misuse of public funds and a betrayal of the trust.”
In a move to combat the crisis, the California Chancellor’s Office is working to implement a mandatory identity verification process, including leveraging AI-powered fraud detection tools and partnering with the DMV for identity verification, with a target rollout date of October 30.
The U.S. Department of Education also pointed to its new “permanent screening process” requiring applicants to present government-issued photo ID. However, the California Chancellor’s Office stated it is still awaiting formal federal guidance on the new requirement. Despite these efforts, the growing sophistication of “ghost students” and the conflicting estimates of financial loss suggest that the fight against this systemic fraud is far from over.
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