Since June 2016, there’s been an increase in fraud applications across system
- As many as 12K in the same day
- Majority coming from outside the U.S.
- Many coming from outside California
What’s motivating spammers?
- Primary motivation: Financial Gain
- Seeking .edu addresses to resell and get benefits
- Getting free software licenses: Office 365
- Getting confirmations of residency
- Using residency to get California IDs
- Potential for serious security attacks
In June 2016, CCCTC Support Services received a report from El Camino College about a large number of fake, or fraudulent, CCCApply applications coming in from a Russian email provider service, Mail.ru. The applications caught the eye of the Admissions Director, Bill Mulrooney, who had spotted the fake applications almost by accident. According to Mr. Mulrooney, he was alerted to the situation when he received an error message about the applicant's zip code not matching the city listed for current mailing address. That led him to identify more "fishy information" and multiple (dozens) matching characteristics within the same download job, including the same street address, but different , social security numbers, and variations of the same email address; many apps had included the same Date of Birth.
Within a few months, more colleges reported being "spammed" by big batches of fraud applications. Several colleges reported downloading as many as 10,000 or more in a single day.
This activity of submitting an application for any purpose other than applying for admission to a California Community College is unauthorized use of a system to process or store data.
By the end of 2016, fraud applications had escalated become the top issues for our colleges Admissions and IT. The costs are largely hidden but are real nonetheless. 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.
However, spam is more than just annoying. It can be dangerous – especially if it's part of a phishing scam in order to obtain passwords, social security numbers, and other personal information, or used to convince an end-user to reveal sensitive information about themselves or internal computer systems.
In addition to being a security risk, spam applications can waste valuable business resources and server space storing and managing them until they are deleted. Along with spam email, surveys, and/or any other unsolicited digital attempt to enter our system, cyber criminals could be using these admission applications to convince end-users (colleges, staff) to reveal sensitive information about themselves or internal computer systems. When a college sends an email to a spammer asking for other information - may allow an attacker targeting our colleges to gain valuable intelligence prior to launching another type of attack.
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.