Photo Courtesy of Towfiqu barbhuiya / Pexels
By Xiomara Santospieve
Faculty are busy talking about an invasion of BOTS.
Administrators not so much.
Frustrated faculty and students insist they have spent months trying to get Southwestern College leaders to acknowledge that the campus — like dozens of other California colleges — is having seats in classes and FAFSA funds stolen by fraudulent AI-generated “fake students” created on computers with stolen social security numbers and addresses.
A BOT, according to the web security publication TechTarget, is shorthand for “robot,” specifically an “internet BOT,” a malicious computer program that “operates as an agent for a user to simulate a human activity.” They can be used to automate tasks, including applying for online classes and collecting financial aid. Once programmed, they can run practically indefinitely without further instructions from humans.
“They run at light speed and multiply exponentially,” said Chris Seero of Eye on Tech. “And they are with us to stay.”
BOTS that steal financial aid started appearing more than two years in the San Francisco Bay Area and have gradually moved down the coast. Los Angeles community colleges were hammered by BOTS in the fall of 2023. They started appearing at Southwestern College in larger numbers during the Spring 2024 semester and launched a full-on invasion during the summer intersession where they gobbled up entire classes and wait lists.
One class with 45 registered students and a waitlist of 40 had just one real student on the first day of the semester. Others had zero actual humans. FAFSA officials said online classes are perfect targets because faculty may never see a real student and often go weeks before giving or grading assignments. This gives BOTS more than enough time to apply for and steal financial aid.
Officials from the U.S. Department of Education and the FBI report that more than 25 million social security numbers have likely been stolen from Americans both living and dead. Purloined numbers are paired with unoccupied or manufactured addresses, often in other states. Names can then be created using AI and paired with stolen social security numbers assigned phony addresses. Names can be based on historical figures, Roman gods, planets and stars, literary figures and online telephone directories – wherever the BOTS are digging around in cyberspace for ideas.
“Some of the names are actually pretty hysterical,” said one frustrated professor. “Who knew Galactosa Demetrius Romulus IV was a student at Southwestern College? Maybe, just maybe, that’s a BOT, verdad?”
Other faculty seem to have lost their sense of humor when it comes to BOTS.
Professor of Political Science Phil Saenz said BOTS are severely damaging students’ ability to get into classes and stay on schedule to transfer.
“Unfortunately, in addition to exploiting the system for financial gain, BOTS (fake students) are a serious concern because they take enrollment opportunities from real Southwestern College students,” he said in a message to his colleagues. “This results in reduced funding for the school and may also lead to class cancellations.”
Saenz’ warning proved prescient. At an emotional Town Hall Meeting Sanchez and two vice presidents sparred with faculty angry about severe cuts to the schedule. Faculty blamed poor handling of enrollment management by administrators combined with BOTS that have left the impression that students are disinterested in classes that were infected by BOTS. Ballesteros said the downstream impact of the summer and fall BOTS invasions have muddied the waters for the January 2025 intersession as well as the spring semester. Deans and department chairs are cutting classes based on the historically low enrollments during the BOTS semesters.
“It definitely impacts students,” she said.
Ballesteros said BOTS are creating misleading impressions of the student enrollment landscape and generating anomalous data that administrators are using as a basis for enrollment decisions, scheduling and staffing.
Academic Senate President Caree Lesh expressed her frustration with Southwestern’s BOT problem in a message to faculty.
“While the ‘bot’ situation is not ours to solve, I have heard so many stories from so many of you…,” she said. “…it benefits all of us to try and stem the flow of ‘bots,’ which are preventing actual students from enrolling in our classes and preventing us from doing our jobs.”
Ballesteros said college administrators’ failure to respond to the BOTS problem borders on malpractice.
“For months, (college president Dr. Mark Sanchez) has claimed that ‘fraudulent student activity’ was limited to around 400 BOTS,” she said. “However, 23/24 enrollment data illustrates that the problem may involve as many as 4,000 fraudulent students. The administration has been aware of this data for several months. Therefore, Dr. Sanchez is either in the dark about what is going on at Southwestern College, or he has chosen to look the other way, neither of which speaks very well of his leadership.”
Ballesteros said her entire summer class received an F grade, the first time that happened in her long teaching career. After being rebuffed by college administrators she said she decided to take matters into her own hands. She started researching the students registered for her class and learned that most were categorized as white males with a Midwest origin. During the spring 2023 semester there were six percent white males at Southwestern, she said, with a 75 percent passing rate. By the end of the summer semester there were 14.4 percent with a 30 percent passing rate.
Other faculty have reported similar findings when they looking into no show students. At an institution comprised primary of students with Latino or Spanish surnames from Latin America and The Philippines, “full” classes routinely had 0-3 students with Spanish names.
Former Southwestern College Financial Aid Specialist Angel Salazar said professionals in his specialty were first alerted to BOTS in July 2021, information he said he shared with college administrators. He said inauthentic financial aid applicants created by BOTS use stolen identities to collect FAFSA and Pell Grant funds. Stolen social security numbers and random vacant addresses spanning the Midwest are the primary fuel for BOTS, he said. Many of the fraudulent BOT schemes were originally created to steal COVID relief funds, he said. Southwestern College’s financial aid program started getting hit by BOTS in large numbers during the Fall 2022 semester, he said.
“We were able to weed out many online student frauds by detecting patterns, such as demographics and residency,” he said.
Salazar, who now works as a NextUp Student Success Coach, said he has noticed large waitlists for 500/600 level online classes. Students had a very difficult time enrolling for Fall classes, he said, and once the semester began it became clear the “students” registered for classes were BOTS.
“Students get blocked out by BOTS and can’t register,” he said. “Then at census the no-shows are dropped, but after the FAFSA was awarded.”
Salazar’s advice to students is to register for classes at the precise minute enrollment opens. He said students should look for waitlists with only one or two people for a better chance to be enrolled.
Many students are so discouraged that they are leaving school, he said.
“Don’t let the current situation dissuade you from signing up for college and registering for classes because this is taking active steps to mitigate fraud,” he said.
Salazar said the Financial Aid Department has not communicated well with students and the community, but he offered a possible explanation.
“They wouldn’t want someone in charge of these Bot Rings to read ‘Oh that’s how they’re (planning to slow fraud),’” he said. “(Fraud rings) are going to change the game to make it more difficult for (colleges) to figure out (how to prevent fraud).”
Ballesteros and other faculty have criticized Sanchez for his boisterous public pronouncements about “soaring enrollment” at Southwestern College. In August, Sanchez’s office sent out press releases about “record enrollment” of 22,000 and the president was interviewed by television news outlets where he trumpeted record high enrollment.
A global email from Sanchez August 20 stated that the Fall semester is “up 20 percent compared to Fall 2023 enrollment!” A September 4 email said, “We have exceeded our first PELL disbursement from Fall 2023 by $1 million.”
Ballesteros said she suspects political motives. Messages from the college that gave the appearance that Southwestern was bursting at the seams may have helped to sway voters to pass an $800 million building bond measure. Faculty interviewed said they could not be certain what the real enrollment was if BOTS were not counted, but estimates ranged from 16,000 to 19,000., far lower than Sanchez’s declaration of 22,000.
The loss of classes and FAFSA was devasting to legions of students said political science major Jose Fernandez.
“I was all set to graduate next semester but because I work too, none of the classes that I had to waitlist accepted (me),” he said. “I decided to take the semester off because it was too difficult to find any classes.”
Laura, a student who would not give her last name, said she was not surprised by what had happened to Fernandez.
“Robots are taking our (financial aid) money and we don’t even know about it,” she said.
The Sun reached out to numerous Southwestern College administrators for comment, but they refused to be interviewed or provide data for this report, including President Mark Sanchez, Chief of Staff Zaneta Encarnacion, Communications Director Sofia Robitaille, Vice President of Finance Omar Gutierrez, Admissions Director Ursula Morris Williams and several members of Financial Aid staff.
Vice President of Student Affairs Rachel Fisher issued a short emailed statement: “The district is working to collect additional information and detail on this matter.”
Gutierrez cancelled a scheduled meeting. His assistant, Andrea Cletus, sent an emailed message: “We appreciate the opportunity, but we have been asked to direct all questions on this topic to the office of Student Affairs. Please contact the VP or the Dean of Enrollment Services for assistance.”
None was forthcoming.
