They’re called “Pell runners” — after enrolling at a community college they apply for a federal Pell grant, collect as much as $7,400, then vanish.
Since fall 2021, California’s community colleges have given more than $5 million to Pell runners, according to monthly reports they sent to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. Colleges also report they’ve given nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid to these scammers.
Should be possible to automate that, right?
Actually, at $7k a time, why automate? Spend the time to do it right.
The simple answer is that kids go back to their school in person and tell a former teacher or principal that remembers them that they want to do a course in Underwater Basket Weaving at Bumfark College, Arizona and the school contacts the college. Colleges can trust schools to verify, and that will solve 95% of people doing it. Most of them recently left school, and live near their old school. For the other 5%, you do some manual verification, maybe even as simple as knocking on the person’s door. “We have you down as wanting to do Underwater Basket Weaving” “What the fuck” means you have fraud.
And if a proportion of the no-shows are linked to a few particular schools, then those schools’ referrals in future go into the manual verification pile. The colleges will just have to ignore the inevitable shouts of “racism, innit” from the usual suspects.