They’re called ghost students, and no, we’re not talking about haunted school hallways.
We're talking about scammers.
Those who apply for grants and loans under the names of actual students, and leave them with the bill.
The San Diego Community College District is no stranger to the scam.
In fact, almost half of their applications from 2025 were fraudulent.
“They're frustrated. Rightfully so,” said Victor Devore, the Dean of Student Services for the San Diego Community College District.
While they aren’t real ghosts, the debt these scammers leave behind can haunt people for years.
“Usually, they won't find out until 2-3 years later that they look at the credit report. They see that they have a a loan taken out in their name at another college they never attended," said Devore.
Devore says there’s nothing supernatural about this scam.
“Ghost students are basically students who applied and enrolled in classes, but they're not actually attending the class,” said Devore.
The ‘ghost students’ then can apply for Pell grants; they typically do the first few weeks of an online class, until that first check drops.
“That's when usually they'll either bounce to another college, and then they'll stop communicating with the faculty, then basically for all intents and purposes stop attending the class because they got what they needed,” said Devore.
Devore says the scams peaked after the pandemic.
In 2024, throughout the entire state of California, more than 30% of applications were fraudulent.
And in 2025, 43% of applications (49,674) to the San Diego Community College District weren't real students either.
$1,066,611.91 in aid was given out to the scammers, but they were able to stop $9,253,487.09 by detecting them beforehand.
“Now we're looking to employ AI to look at the same data sets in a more large scale fashion and hopefully being able to prevent them from even getting into our system in the first place when they apply,” said Devore.
Now AI can look for ip and email addresses that don’t match up- a task that often fell to professors and other staff.
The state’s fighting back, too.
The California Community College Chancellor’s Office said that identity verification will be mandatory in April. Students will use the DMV mobile app, ID.me, or show up in person.
“We always know that these ghost students employ different methods, and they always change their game, so we also have to make sure that we're on top of it with our own systems,” said Devore.
The Federal Trade Commission recommends immediately freezing your credit if you think a similar scam has targeted you.
