The scamdemic is the gift that keeps on giving, and it’s only a matter of time before we the taxpayers are called upon to settle the student loan bill for robots too.

According to a report from SFGate, “ghost” students are on the rise at colleges across the nation, particularly in California, a dramatic increase seen after much of the education sector transitioned to remote learning during 2020.

Here’s the story:

When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not everyone was a real student.

[snip]

Some of the disengaged students in Pugh’s courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are ‘ghost students,’ and they’ve been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These ‘ghost students’ are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans.

Correction: “When the government upended the world....”

Who might be behind this scheme? Well if I had to wager a guess, my money’s on the teachers’ unions, or shadowy “progressive” organizations—but it’s safe to say that it’s not conservatives behind the scam.

Now, during the four years Joe Biden spent in office, he “forgave” around $183,000,000,000—that’s billion—in student loan debt using our money. How much of that went to coursework for robots? Apparently, the problem with bots really only began in 2021 (again, a lovely addition to the litany of scams that flourished in a post-COVID world). And, some ground-breaking insight, from a government official in California: “Bots don’t act on their own, there is almost always a human behind it[.]” Wait, so computers don’t build or program themselves, and they’re simply machines carrying out the functions they’re commanded to do by their human user? Who knew? What would we do without these geniuses?

The SFGate article also notes that between 2023 and 2024, the number of scammed dollars through financial aid fraud more than doubled:

Financial aid fraud is not new, but it’s been on the rise in California’s community colleges, Cal Matters reported, with scammers stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount in 2023.

How entirely fitting that scam begets scam, begets scam.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.