College application fraud is surging. Here’s your five-step defense plan.
Across the country, we hear our partner colleges and universities sounding the alarm on a new kind of enrollment challenge: fraudulent applications designed to steal financial aid.
Institutions (community colleges and open-access institutions especially) are seeing sophisticated schemes often driven by bots and AI that generate thousands of fake “students” that exist only long enough to trigger financial aid disbursements. Recent investigations have found that scammers have stolen more than $10 million in federal financial aid from California community colleges in just 12 months.
However, colleges don’t have to tackle this alone or manually. In this blog post I’ll unpack how new application fraud defense capabilities, like those in Navigate360, are giving colleges and universities a way to protect their enrollment pipelines and keep the focus on real students.
Why open-access institutions and community colleges are especially vulnerable
Scammers go where the barriers are lowest and the aid volume is high. Mission-driven institutions, especially those with limited administrative bandwidth and technology environments built for access rather than fraud detection, check both boxes.
- Open admissions policies make it easy for fake students to get in the door
- High levels of online and asynchronous coursework reduce face-to-face verification
- Significant federal and state aid create strong incentives to enroll just long enough to trigger disbursement
Criminal networks now routinely use:
- Stolen or fake identities
- AI-generated responses to application questions
- Bots that can submit applications and complete basic online tasks at scale
The result: institutions lose millions in aid, staff are pulled into tedious investigative work, and real students find full sections and slower processing times because “ghost” students fill seats and clog administrative queues.
What a modern fraud defense should look like
Most student CRM platforms were built to help you recruit, enroll, and retain more students, not to differentiate between real applicants and fraudulent enrollments.
Here’s how these systems should work for you behind the scenes to make sure your teams are only reviewing and accepting real prospective students.
1. Contact anomaly detection: “Is this a real person?”
The first line of defense is verifying that the identity behind each application is real. A modern enrollment CRM should support the following workflows:
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Validates identity data
Automates real-time scanning of name, date of birth, and address against trusted third-party sources (including credit agencies, utilities, and government databases)
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Checks phone numbers for legitimacy
Compares the provided number with existing CRM data and known-number databases
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Assesses email legitimacy with AI
Evaluates email addresses for patterns associated with throwaway email accounts, mass-created inboxes, or known fraud indicators
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Supports existing fraud-prevention partners
Allows schools to maintain existing workflows with fraud-prevention partners like AMSA SAFE and BMTX Identity Verification.
2. IP address monitoring: “Does the digital footprint match the story?”
Fraudsters may use VPNs, shared networks, or automated tools to submit many applications from the same place. Your CRM should connect each application’s digital footprint to the physical information provided by the applicant. These checks help institutions distinguish between legitimate remote students and patterns that suggest large-scale fraud:
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IP address reuse
Blocks applications when multiple identical submissions come from the same IP address
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IP-to-address inconsistency
- Compares the originating IP location to the applicant’s listed home address
- Flags discrepancies so staff can quickly see when a “local” applicant appears to be applying from somewhere entirely different
3. Behavioral and timing analysis: “Does this behave like a human?”
Instead of expecting staff to notice that 40 applications were submitted in the same five minutes overnight, the system should surface that pattern automatically. Fraudulent applications tend to move through the system differently than real students, and your CRM should check for these:
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Unrealistic submission speed
Automatically blocks applications that are started and completed so quickly that they are unlikely to have been created by a human user
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Suspicious submission timing
Flags applications submitted at atypical local times or in unusual bursts—signals often associated with automated or scripted behavior
4. Duplicate detection: “Have we seen this before?”
Fraud rings frequently reuse information or create many versions of the same fake student. You CRM should protect both your data quality and your staff’s time, preventing your team from chasing the same bad actor across multiple records:
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Blocks repeat applications
Stops repeat submissions of the exact same application before they enter staff workflows
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Flags multiple identical profiles
Identifies when the same data shows up across multiple “students” in the system
5. AI detection alone isn’t enough
The strongest defenses also add in verification steps that fraudulent students can’t easily fake. Your CRM should use additional identity checks with multi-factor identity verification built into the enrollment process:
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Phone number verification
Applicants receive a one-time SMS code sent to the phone number they provide and they must enter that code to proceed
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Government ID and facial match verification
Applicants scan a state-issued ID or passport and the CRM then captures a real-time image of their face
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reCAPTCHA-based bot detection
- Uses reCAPTCHA to filter out automated, bot-driven submissions at the earliest possible point
- Reduces noise in the system and stops basic fraud attempts from ever reaching your application pool
How EAB’s Navigate360 CRM is tackling this problem
The features and steps described above help ensure that a real person, not a stolen identity or automated system, is behind each application. However, even the best detection tools only help if staff can quickly act on what they find. Your CRM should be able to not only detect these queues, but also surface them in easy-to-act-on insights for your enrollment team to review.
This is the design philosophy behind application fraud defense capabilities in Navigate360, which give institutions always-on protection within their enrollment CRM without external dashboards or complex integrations required. Navigate360 is designed to put insights directly into the hands of admissions and financial aid teams in a format they can use so staff can stay focused on real students who need timely support, clear communication, and access to on-time enrollment.
Navigate360 delivers AI-powered monitoring, prevention, identification, and alerting on every application submitted to partner institutions. All capabilities are native in Navigate360, so staff don’t have to juggle additional tools or vendor portals.
On top of the five defenses I mentioned, every application in Navigate360 also receives:
- An overall application fraud risk score, informed by all the flags and signals generated during processing
- A calculated application risk level (e.g., low, medium, or high) displayed when staff view an application or any relevant application reports
- The ability to drill down into the specific indicators that contributed to that score (e.g., IP mismatch, suspicious email, duplicate profile)
This approach reduces review work by allowing staff to focus only on the small subset of applications that truly require an additional look. It also provides clear context, so decisions are consistent and documentation is easy to maintain.
As fraudulent applications continue to rise, colleges that invest in layered, intelligent defenses will be best positioned to safeguard limited aid dollars, protect staff capacity, and preserve the promise of an affordable and/or open access college experience for the students who are truly counting on it.
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