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California woman enrolled in college by scammers using AI to collect $9,000 in financial aid—she’s only one of 223,000 suspected fake enrollments in the state

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It was an unusual question coming from a police officer. Heather Brady was napping at home in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon when the officer knocked on her door to ask: Had she applied to Arizona Western College?

She had not, and as the officer suspected, somebody else had applied to Arizona community colleges in her name to scam the government into paying out financial aid money.

When she checked her student loan servicer account, Brady saw the scammers hadn’t stopped there. A loan for over $9,000 had been paid out in her name — but to another person — for coursework at a California college.

“I just can’t imagine how many people this is happening to that have no idea,” Brady said.

The rise of artificial intelligence and the popularity of online classes have led to an explosion of financial aid fraud. Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy “ghost students” — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check.

In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real. Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits. And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased.

On Friday, the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity. It will apply only to first-time applicants for federal student aid for the summer term, affecting some 125,000 borrowers. The agency said it is developing more advanced screening for the fall.

“The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program,” the department said in its guidance to colleges.

Public colleges have lost millions of dollars to fraud

An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target.

Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports.

Colleges typically receive a portion of the loans intended for tuition, with the balance going directly to students for other expenses. Community colleges are targeted in part because their lower tuition means larger percentages of grants and loans go to borrowers.

Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time.

In January, Wayne Chaw started getting emails about a class he never signed up for at De Anza Community College, where he had taken coding classes a decade earlier. Identity thieves had obtained his Social Security number and collected $1,395 in financial aid in his name.

The energy management class required students to submit a homework assignment to prove they were real. But someone wrote submissions impersonating Chaw, likely using a chatbot.

“This person is typing as me, saying my first and last name. … It’s very freaky when I saw that,” said Chaw.

The fraud involved a grant, not loans, so Chaw himself did not lose money. He called the Social Security Administration to report the identity theft, but after five hours on hold, he never got through to a person.

As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the Education Department, federal cuts may make it harder to catch criminals and help victims of identity theft. In March, the Trump administration fired more than 300 people from the Federal Student Aid office, and the department’s Office of Inspector General, which investigates fraud, has lost more than 20% of its staff through attrition and retirements since October.

“I’m just nervous that I’m going to be stuck with this,” Brady said. “The agency is going to be so broken down and disintegrated that I won’t be able to do anything, and I’m just going to be stuck with those $9,000” in loans.

Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes’ pervasiveness.

In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.

Identify fraud victims who never attended college are hit with student debt

Brittnee Nelson of Shreveport, Louisiana, was bringing her daughter to day care two years ago when she received a notification that her credit score had dropped 27 points.

Loans had been taken out in her name for colleges in California and Louisiana, she discovered. She canceled one before it was paid out, but it was too late to stop a loan of over $5,000 for Delgado Community College in New Orleans.

Nelson runs her own housecleaning business and didn’t go to college. She already was signed up for identity theft protection and carefully monitored her credit. Still, her debt almost went into collections before the loan was put in forbearance. She recently got the loans taken off her record after two years of effort.

“It’s like if someone came into your house and robbed you,” she said.

The federal government’s efforts to verify borrowers’ identity could help, she said.

“If they can make these hurdles a little bit harder and have these verifications more provable, I think that’s really, really, really going to protect people in the long run,” she said.

Delgado spokesperson Barbara Waiters said responsibility for approving loans ultimately lies with federal agencies.

“This is an unfortunate and serious matter, but it is not the direct or indirect result of Delgado’s internal processes,” Waiters said.

In San Francisco, the loans taken out in Brady’s name are in a grace period, but still on the books. That has not been her only challenge. A few months ago, she was laid off from her job and decided to sign up for a class at City College San Francisco to help her career. But all the classes were full.

After a few weeks, Brady finally was able to sign up for a class. The professor apologized for the delay in spots opening up: The college has been struggling with fraudulent applications.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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CBO digs further into ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ and now says it will raise deficit by $2.8 trillion

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The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.

The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.

“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.

Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.

The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.

Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.

But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.

“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.

At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.

“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.

The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.

The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.

Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.

While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.

The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”

The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.



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Legal experts and economists sound the alarm over the EU’s sustainability rules rollback

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Dozens of legal scholars and economists have issued stark warnings over attempts by the European Commission (EC) to weaken corporate accountability laws, saying the action will wreck corporate accountability commitments, slash human rights and environmental protections, and lead to higher costs for companies and society.

Under pressure from corporate lobbyists, the EC has been discussing reshaping rules that govern how companies monitor and report their activity. Last month, both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz escalated their campaign against the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which covers firms’ supply chains, claiming that the regulations threatened to make European businesses uncompetitive. In a speech, Macron told business executives the CSDDD should be “put off the table” entirely, expressing support for an EC “Omnibus Simplification Package” that would eliminate requirements for companies to monitor their supply chains for violations, remove mandatory climate transition plans, and significantly weaken enforcement mechanisms including civil liability provisions.

But legal and economics scholars, environmental organizations and businesses, along with countries such as Sweden and Denmark, have united to defend the regulations.

“The members of the European Parliament shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that if they remove this article that that’s going to somehow amount to a reduction in regulatory burden,” said Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance at the University of Oxford, and the founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. “What will come in its place is a very litigious landscape and differential implementation of national requirements. You will have replaced a nicely uniform obligation with a patchwork of a variety of different and uncertain obligations.”

In May, Wetzer and more than 30 other legal scholars sent a letter to the EC warning that, far from reducing costs, scrapping the regulations would create a range of new financial and legal risks for companies, as well as making it harder for them to achieve their sustainability and climate goals. The scholars warn that, “Without guiding regulations, corporate climate transitions will be more disorderly and costly.”

Furthermore, Wetzer notes, many European companies have already taken steps to comply with the regulations. Indeed, towards the beginning of the year, 11 major brands, including the likes of IKEA [F500E #85, as Ingka], Maersk [F500E #70] and Unilever [F500E #49] came out in support of the CSDDD, signing and open letter that stated: “Investment and competitiveness are founded on policy certainty and legal predictability. The announcement that the European Commission will bring forward an ‘omnibus’ initiative that could include revisiting existing legislation risks undermining both of these.”

“Businesses have already started to put in place reporting frameworks to be able to align with the regulatory package,” Wetzer told Fortune. “There has been a lot of investment in the regulatory architecture on the assumption that this would stay in place for a long time. If you change this regulation and you go beyond simplification, you run the risk that all of those investments go down the drain.”

Legal scholars aren’t the only experts to have sounded the alarm on the EC’s plans. Also in May, more than 90 prominent economists criticized Omnibus proposals, strongly refuting claims that the sustainability regulations harm European competitiveness. Instead, they point to other factors behind Europe’s economic challenges, including the energy price crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, declining global demand, wage stagnation, and chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure.

The economists’ statement emphasizes that implementation costs for sustainability regulations are minimal, citing a London School of Economics study that estimated compliance costs for large companies at just 0.009% of revenue. They argue that the benefits of the regulations far outweigh such modest expenses, and further note that, with an estimated €750 billion investment gap in sustainable initiatives, the weakening of sustainability reporting requirements could undermine crucial programs like the Clean Industrial Deal and discourage private investment in sustainable projects.

“Economic choices are political choices,” said Johannes Jäger, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna. “With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”

To this point, many critics of the Omnibus package have framed it as opportunistic, saying it is an attempt to both mimic and placate U.S. President Donald Trump who, whilst threatening Europe with tariffs, is carrying out a program of sweeping deregulation across America. U.S. companies have been at the forefront of lobbying efforts to undermine the CSDDD, with watchdogs claiming that investment giant BlackRock helped carve out exemptions from the directive for large financial firms. 

“With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”Johannes Jäger, professor, University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna

Such actions have motivated other European finance leaders to rally around the CSDDD. In February, more than 200 financial institutions, representing $7.6 trillion in assets under management, urged the EC to maintain strong sustainability standards. Aleksandra Palinska, executive director at the European Sustainable Investment Forum, warned that the Omnibus would “limit investor access to comparable and reliable sustainability data and impair their ability to scale-up investments for industrial decarbonisation.”

Rather than following Trump and doubling down on deregulation, European finance experts have urged the EU to maintain its resolve, along with its reputation for probity. In January, François Gemenne, a professor at HEC Paris and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, said that “the best response to the policies implemented in the U.S. is to beef up the EU green agenda, not to weaken it. Rather than follow Trump’s way, we should design our own path.”

Wetzer agreed, saying that the Omnibus proposals harm the European Union’s standing as a rational actor. “The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds,” he said. In turbulent times, he suggested, a strong stabilizing influence is required. “We should chart our own course based on our assessment of the fundamentals.”

But beyond the legal and economic impacts, it is the environmental and human rights implications of the EC’s proposed changes that have drawn the most fire. In March, more than 360 global NGOs and civil society groups issued a joint statement against the Omnibus, stating that EC President Ursula von der Leyen was “deprioritizing human rights, workers’ rights and environmental protections for the sake of dangerous deregulation.” 

“The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds…”Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance, University of Oxford and founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme

In comments accompanying the letter, Marion Lupin, policy officer for the European Coalition for Corporate Justice, said: “The message from Brussels couldn’t be clearer: industry interests come first, while people and the planet are left behind … hundreds of civil society organisations around the world are standing up—no to deregulation, no to greenwashing, and no to this reckless rollback of corporate accountability.”

As the Omnibus proposal moves through the European Parliament, the key question is whether EU institutions will preserve their original ambition to guide Europe through its sustainability transition, or acquiesce to corporate lobbying power. The outcome will likely have far-reaching implications for corporate accountability, human rights, and the fight against climate change.



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Wilmar hands over $729M as ‘security deposit’ over Indonesia palm oil corruption case

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Wilmar International, the Singapore-based agrifood giant, has handed over 11.9 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($729 million) to Indonesia as a “security deposit,” related to misconduct allegations over palm oil export permits. Wilmar’s shares dropped by 3% on the news, reaching their lowest point in a decade.

Wilmar generated $67.4 billion in revenue last year, a 0.3% increase year-on-year. The agrifood giant earned $1.2 billion in annual profit, meaning its $729 million “security deposit” is equal to about 60% of Wilmar’s entire 2024 net income. 

Indonesian prosecutors accuse Wilmar of bribing officials to obtain the permits in 2022, during a national cooking oil shortage. While an Indonesian court cleared Wilmar and two other companies in March, the three judges behind the ruling were arrested on graft charges a month later. 

Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office claims that corruption tied to these export permits cost the state 12.3 trillion rupiah ($755 million). 

On Tuesday, Wilmar claimed that “all acts carried out by [Wilmar] during this period in relation to the export of cooking oil was done in compliance with prevailing regulations.” Wilmar will get its “security deposit” back if Indonesia’s Supreme Court upholds the acquittal–but will forfeit the money if it loses the case.  

“Wilmar paid for the state losses they caused,” a senior official from Indonesia’s AGO said at a Tuesday press conference

Indonesia accounts for about 60% of global palm oil supply. Crude palm oil is a major ingredient in food products and household goods. In response to a cooking oil shortage in late 2021 and early 2022, Indonesia imposed strict export restrictions on palm oil, including a three-week-long export ban, in order to preserve local supply and rein in rising prices. 

Wilmar is one of the world’s largest owners of oil palm plantations, with a total planted area of over 230,000 hectares. It’s one of the region’s largest companies, ranked No. 4 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500; it’s also one of the few companies in the region to make it onto the Global 500, Fortune’s ranking of the world’s largest companies by revenue.

Two-thirds of Wilmar’s oil palm plantations are in Indonesia. Besides palm oil and cooking oil, Wilmar also produces other food products like rice, noodles and margarine for global markets. 



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