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First |
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Sign of |
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FraudIn June 2016, CCCTC Support Services received |
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it's first report of fraudulent activity from Bill Mulrooney, Director of Admissions at El Camino College, |
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identifying, what appeared to be, a large number of fake |
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CCCApply applications |
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submitted through a Russian email provider service, Mail.ru. According to Mr. Mulrooney, |
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the suspicious apps were spotted while searching for a specific applicant in the Report Center by street address - and noticed multiple instances of matching characteristics within the same submit date, including matching street address, Date of Birth, and email address - all of which came from the "mail.ru" provider. He also brought the issue to the CCCApply Steering Committee and issued a formal request to Tech Center to investigate.
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By the end of 2016, the number of colleges reporting suspicious batches of fraud apps coming in through CCCApply had escalated. In a few cases, colleges reported receiving as many as 10,000 or more fake apps in a single day. By this point, the characteristics used to identify fraud applications had expanded considerably, and we began seeing many different international service providers and other known bad actors. Fraud applications were being submitted from inside the U.S., but the majority are coming from outside the U.S. Most are from outside of California.
The Tech Center, with full support from the CCCApply Steering Committee, immediately responded by implementing a series of security measures, including:
- Increased firewall protections across our local and AWS servers (Amazon Web Services)
- Blocked TOR and other known bad actor IP addresses
- Implemented a series of stop-gap fixes to temporarily block applications from being submitted and reaching the college
- Contracted with a machine learning data analytics company to commence research study
- Set Up a Pilot Project with the four top colleges getting spammed
- Continuous learning for improvements
- Working with CCCTC Marketing & Communication team
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Read More about the "Ways We Are Addressing Fraud in CCCApply" |
Consequences of Spam
The costs associated with these fraud applications are largely hidden at this point, but they are real nonetheless. We've learned they consist mainly of the time staff spend sorting through the legitimate applications to identify the fraud data and keeping it from their student information systems.
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Up Next: Ways We Are Addressing Fraud in CCCApply |
Over the past 18 months, the CCCApply development team has been working with a machine learning data research and analysis team to better understand the increasing number of spam/fraudulent applications coming in through CCCApply and ultimately build a spam filter service that will identify, flag, and suspend bad applications before they get to the college's download file. The filter will include an admin user-interface, similar to an email application spam filter system, where college admins can specify and process the flagged bad applications from the legitimate ones, thus training the backend algorithm each time an application is processed.
What’s motivating spammers?
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