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Soon after the first wave of fraud applications were identified in June 2016, the CCC Technology Center took immediate steps to strengthen the security of the CCCApply system and protect our students' personal identifiable data (read more about all the ways we are addressing fraud in CCCApply). Meanwhile, we contracted with a machine learning data research team to perform data analysis on several thousand fraud applications examples that were collected from the colleges that initially reported the spam.

Research Objectives

The objectives for the research project were simple:

• Understand why we are seeing an influx of fraudulent applications across the CCC system
• Understand the motivations behind these fraudulent attacks
• Identify trends, commonalities and patterns in the data
• Identify the tools and techniques being used by spammers
• What can CCCApply do to prevent fraud now and in the future?
• What can the colleges do to prevent fraud now and in the future?

Additional objectives were added based on the recommendations and outcomes of the research, including commencing a small pilot of four colleges to get feedback and understand their workflow processes, as well as develop a process for collecting data throughout the design and development phase of the project.