The University of California is opposed to rising tragedy, so-called “ghosts” or synthetic students that fueled artificial intelligence.
Ghost students are fake or stolen identity equipped by a con man who kills the university with thousands of applications, accepts quickly as a student, demands financial aid, and then disappears with money. Some people submit their homework so that they don't get launched from the class before collecting them. The Ministry of Education issued a recommendation in the spring to ensure that universities not only steal financial aid, but also take up so much space in classes that they cannot attend the courses needed for actual students to graduate, thus taking up high vigilance for fraudulent students. Last month, the DOE revealed it had discovered 150,000 suspicious identities in a federal student aid form, saying $90 million went out to ineligible students. They tracked the $30 million in aid given to those who had their identities used to enroll in the class.
After being hit hard by ghost students in 2024, the California Community College (CCC) system began using AI to fight AI-driven schemes. This month, CCC launched an enterprise-wide AI initiative using N2N's LightLeap.AI platform to detect fraudulent registrations. According to a recent update, 79,016 total applications have been detected as fraud across more than 500,000 applications since the rollout still in effect at all 116 universities.
“The only answer to the bad guys in AI is the good guys in AI,” Kiran Kodithala said luck.
Kodithala is CEO and founder of N2N Services, and his LightLeap.AI platform is currently part of the CCC registration system that detects fraud across applications, class registrations, and financial AID processes. The system will be deployed across the entire CCC system by the end of the calendar year of 2025.
So far, the extent of the ghost student outbreak has been varied between districts, but even the largest ranges are not immune to attack.
In the Santa Barbara Community College district, 320,487 applications were processed, with 24,485 ghost students flagging them with a fake student rate of 7.6%, while Ventura County handled a fake student rate of 21.4% with 113,204 applications. The Citrus District had a rate of 34.6% across 49,837 processed applications. In the small Lassen area, 65.3% of the application, 4,652 out of 7,129, were flagged as fraudulent by LightLeap.
Community Colleges are a particular goal as they are open-access teaching and learning institutions designed to accommodate almost everyone, Koditara said.
“Community Colleges have open access, like a physical campus where everyone can just enter. That's because of design,” he said.
Traditional identity verification methods also do not work well in a demographic cohort consisting of ages 18-24, Koditara added. That age group often does not have a record of their initial credit card, company work and email addresses, or properties. It creates vulnerability that the con artists are exploiting ghost students. So, Kodithala not only does the LightLeap platform look at databases and use those entry points to verify identity, but also looks at application data to see the patterns that typical rogue students who try to register with community colleges.
“They are following the path of least resistance,” Koditara said. “They fill in enough application fields to pass the screen and fill them more than they need. Regular students list all their previous addresses and all their previous schools.”
Beyond California, Lightleap operates in schools in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota. But the key issue is to make sure that real students are little or no flagging them as fraudulent, he said, making it even more difficult for them to apply to and register for the university. Or, conversely, fraudulent students are flagged as uneducated, taking up space in their class and wasting time and resources.
“Think about a subway sandwich shop,” Koditara said. “Thousands of people are making sandwich orders, 3,000 come from real people, while 700 are bad orders. You lose money on bad orders and can't serve good people.”
