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It’s no secret that application fraud has become rampant across the U.S. and potentially institutions of higher education throughout the world. Improving and evolving technology has made it easier for people to submit mass applications for admission, scraping data from the internet to seem legitimate. Why? The obvious reason is Financial Aid fraud.

How are we combatting these fraudulent applications or at least identifying them as they enter our systems? And what are we seeing in the Registrar’s office? Plenty.

Last July we discovered more than 350 new person IDs that entered our SIS in one nightly run of the application import process. In the Registrar’s office, we identified these accidentally as we review potential duplicate IDs daily via our custom Duplicate ID component. Overnight, we had more than 500 new duplicate ID cases to resolve. Highly unusual, we typically see two or three on any given day.

Other clues that might tip you off:

The same address for several or more seemingly unrelated applicants. Only 27 unique addresses were brought in with the 368 person IDs that entered our SIS one night in July 2025.

Strange addresses missing the street number or street entirely, such as North Figueroa Street, Harbor Freeway, Us 101, Astronaut Ellison S Onizuka Street. No building numbers, no apartment numbers, only a street (or freeway??).

Applicants from unusual locations. For example, we typically receive the majority of our applicants from our state and the surrounding Midwest states, or international students. However, we have been seeing a lot of applicants from California, Alaska, Utah, etc. Of those 368 fraudulent applicants, 321 were supposedly from California. Not typical for our university in DeKalb, Illinois!

Several or more seemingly unrelated applicants with the same phone number. Of those 368 fraudulent applicants, only 26 unique phone numbers. How about email addresses? Strange, strange email addresses. Emvjcosl@tzwx.edu.pl, many more like that, most in that one group with the ‘tzwx.edu.pl’ email domain.

You might think ‘sure, it’s easy to see when you have more than 350 at one time, but what about a few here and there?’. How can we identify potential fraudulent applicants?

Recently I was tasked with looking into a few dozen cases of two or more student IDs with the same phone number being used for MFA or SSO authentication (a-ha, another way to identify them!). What was discovered?

Applicants providing SSNs that are not “native” to the birth state indicated on their application. This was only discovered as I was reviewing an application with a birth state of Illinois, but an SSN that very likely did not come from Illinois, so I Googled. These online resources may prove useful for this situation:

·         https://public-dhhs.ne.gov/nfocus/HowDoI/howdoi/understand_social_security_number_prefixes.htm

·         https://usgennet.org/usa/ne/topic/resources/basic/ssn.html

·         https://www.mrfa.org/miscellaneous/ssn-prefixes/

Addresses…one emergency contact address belongs to a car wash in Anchorage, AK and another to a vehicle service center. I have seen addresses that are in the middle of a field! Google or GoogleMaps is a helpful tool in determining if an address is legitimate. Maybe that emergency contact did live at the car wash? I don’t know their situation but it seems unlikely.

Applications of different, seemingly unrelated people from different locations with the same name as an emergency contact or a parent, emergency contact on one person’s application, parent on another.

Seemingly incorrect demographic data, such as an emergency contact who is the spouse of the applicant who is barely 18 years old. This is also not entirely out of the question, just strange. If you add that to the other unusual data points, it confirms (even more) that it is fraudulent.

An applicant born and raised in a town or city, still living in that town or city, attending high school in that town or city, but in another state. Two recent applicants reported being born in DeKalb, IL, still living here, and completing DeKalb High School---in DeKalb, Texas and Waterloo, Indiana. AI forgot to check the HS city and state those times!

Applicants with multiple high schools, in different states, different than the current address. This is also not an out-of-the-question situation, but when you are seeing these more frequently, it raises a red flag.

Obviously these are ‘admissions-related’, but we all know that Student Records encompasses all of this information and we are the go-to for research and verification of students’ records. Completely on the SR side, we are also seeing transcripts being fraudulently ordered and sent from our institution to another. Why do this? Financial Aid has a higher cap for graduate programs.

What are you seeing? Join us for a community discussion soon! Date and time TBD, keep watch for the announcement!