With FAFSA, the assistance is all encapsulated away from the student- you apply for an assistance loan (requires SSN), an account is created for you, the college is hooked up directly to that account, so you never actually handle the cash. How does this specific fraud actually work?
The reason these are ripe for fraud is that in many cases they were implemented as direct deposit transfers directly to registered students. They were implemented without checks or controls in order to get the money out ASAP, so anyone who registered as a student and entered the correct information to qualify could get one of those direct deposits.
As far as I can tell, some of the implementation details depended on the college. Scammers likely tried different colleges until they discovered a system that didn't verify anything (California Junior College System) and then started filling out forms to collect the direct deposits.
The fact that scammers are registering with obviously fake names like "Barack Obama" suggests that zero confirmations are being performed at all before this money is distributed.
Thanks for providing the additional details.
That doesn't strike me as fake. I've met Osama Bin Laden, at least one of the many people in this world with that name. There are no doubt many people called Gene Simmons who might have issues setting up accounts. James Bond was named after an author of bird books. I bet his descendants still get laughs at school. I met a junior officer once, last name "Planet". Good luck keeping a straight face on parade as they get promoted to Captain.
It’s not like Bezos will cash this cheque.
Of course he won't be doing anything so mundane personally, people like him will have teams whose job it is to squeeze every cent.
He actually was entitled to it. His earnings in 2011 were below $100,000. I'm all for keeping people honest, but let's not lie.
See, in 2010 he was worth $12.6 billion. In 2011 it was $18.1 billion. Then in 2012 went up to $23.2 billion. These figures apparently come from Forbes, who calculate this stuff.. see https://www.therichest.com/lifestyles/jeff-bezo-years-earned...
I guess he didn't "earn" that money though.. so would definitely have been entitled to a benefit for folk who don't earn so much? My bad...
The fact that the criteria for the payout was just income and not a combination of income and assets is the fault of the people writing the legislation.
Our efforts to avoid accidentally helping a rich person via means testing cause for more damage to our ability to help poor and middle class people.
Just give everybody the same amount of cash and leave it at that! There are few enough rich people (almost by definition) that it won't save much to exclude them.
Mostly it's people getting free .edu email address which allows discounts on software and other things. This is most of the 65K fake students.
Then there's the fraud, where students are paying people $ to take their classes to get the government $$$$ -
"However, Rich soon realized that all of the work being submitted by four students was clearly being completed by an individual who wasn’t a student in the class." https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/california-co...
This might be why middle names are missing. That data is unknown but the other data real.
I suspect they are wrong about the third type of external fraud, but not sure.
Then there's the fraud where the College gets benefits from student numbers so allows the spam.
This is how one section of the Danish educational system worked for years: Pointless, governmentally funded study programmes that don’t qualify for any kind of real-world work, but the school gets a yearly reward per student, and the students get a monthly deposit for being a student.