The Justice Department has arrested several foreign nationals tied to a “ghost student” scheme that used stolen American identities to enroll people who never existed at colleges across the country and pull federal financial aid out of the system, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald announced at a Thursday news conference. McDonald said 40 cases have been opened across 26 field offices, and that agents have seized more than $750,000 in laundered cryptocurrency connected to networks in Kenya. He described an operation built to look ordinary: the Department of Education approves the aid, the money goes to the school, tuition and fees are deducted, and what is left lands in accounts the fraudsters control.

McDonald also said the schemes are growing harder to spot. Some use automated tools to fill out applications and complete coursework, and some fabricate a presence in online classrooms so instructors believe a real student is enrolled. The point is to stay enrolled semester after semester for as long as the money keeps flowing.

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From Breitbart:

“These are not isolated errors,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald at a Thursday news conference. “This is organized fraud at scale.”

“If successful at duping the Department of Education, ED then sends the aid money to the college where the ghost student is enrolled,” McDonald added. “After tuition and fees are deducted, the leftover federal funds are deposited directly into bank accounts controlled by fraudsters, and in a flash, the money vanishes, often overseas to places like Kenya.”

“When we walked in the door last January, we were extremely troubled to find that the Biden administration had turned off nearly every fraud detection measure, allowing critical funds to become the target of large-scale fraud,” Kent said. “The federal student aid programs result in about a $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio. That’s like turning off fraud detection efforts at Wells Fargo, which is just crazy.”

Theft is only part of the injury. McDonald described an American who finished high school, went straight to work to support his family, never applied to college, never enrolled in a class and never requested a dime of federal aid, yet one day found his name on a loan from a school hundreds or thousands of miles away, with his credit at risk and his name on the bill. That is the quieter cost of the scheme: identity theft that surfaces years later, at a mortgage counter or a car dealership, and takes years to unwind. He said investigators have personnel in Kenya tracing the recipients and the money trails, and he warned that prosecution will follow the fraud wherever it leads, naming Nebraska, New Jersey, Virginia and Nairobi in the same breath.

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent aimed his anger at the previous administration, saying officials found on arriving in January that fraud detection measures across federal student aid had been switched off. The student loan portfolio stands at roughly $1.7 trillion, a figure Kent compared to shutting down fraud monitoring at a major bank and calling it unthinkable. The Department of Education approves aid applications and disburses funds to institutions, which then remit tuition and return the balance, a structure that assumes the student on the paperwork is a person. Neither department said how many people were arrested, which colleges were involved, or whether any institutions are under investigation, and the Justice Department did not release the names of defendants or the charges filed in the 40 open cases. No response from Kenyan authorities appeared in the account.

It is sad to see so much money wasted on people who were cheating the system to get wealthy while real college students are lacking that needed money. This is deception, a scam, and an injustice. Let’s pray that the officials now rebuilding those safeguards would be thorough rather than merely reactive; that investigators in Nairobi and in every field office would trace the money all the way to the end; that the members of Congress who oversee the student aid system would demand real accountability for the years it was left open; for the Americans whose credit and good names were stolen, that they would find swift relief and honest help; and that this nation would remember that stewardship of the public purse is a moral duty, not an administrative afterthought.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from Breitbart. Photo Credit: zimmytws from Getty Images via Canva).