Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Hello and welcome everybody to the first episode of the Intellicheck podcast. I'm your host, Bill Roth. This is the show where we delve into the news and issues around identity verification, identity fraud, and the tools needed to combat it. This week's topic is ghost students. There was recently an article who about this in SFGate. We'll have a link to that in the show Notes with us this week is industry allstar Brian Lewis, CEO of Intellicheck and someone who knows a lot about the issue and has a new article on the subject. Welcome, Brian.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: So, for the folks in the audience who are not familiar, what are ghost students?
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Basically, they're fake students who are signing up to steal financial aid.
And it is a large and growing problem. In 2022, Forbes reported over $5 billion worth of student aid was stolen.
And if you look at even now, the community college chancellor's office in California last year said one in four applications for loans were bots, and they even upped it to 30% this year.
And then now we just had the Department of Education come out and say they found at least $30 million of loans been issued to deceased people.
So a large economic problem, but also it's a large problem of keeping people who want to go to school out. These folks have enrolled and they take up class space.
So it not only hurts economically, it's hurting those folks who do want to go to university and better themselves.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Interesting. So why is this happening? And who's, you know, you said it's a $5 billion problem at a minimum.
Also, who, who's doing this? How would you, how would you frame that?
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Organized groups? You know, so much of identity theft truly is organized crime, you know, and it's, it's very simple to steal somebody's identity because of the amount of data that has been breached. You know, so for me to go online and buy your name, address, Social Security number, phone number, email address is going to be 10 to $20, depending on how strong your credit rating is. And then, you know, I have stacks of fake IDs that we get from our customers. To go now and get an ID that makes me look like you is going to cost me $40.
So that's really it. If you think about anytime you go anywhere and somebody's going to ask you to prove who you are, whether it's a student loan application or a credit card or whatever it is, they Generally ask for two things. Your government issued ID, Social Security number, and for 60 bucks I got that and now I go shopping.
So it's a numbers game for organized crime.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: So what can we do about this? How do we, how do we make this better? How do we solve this problem?
[00:03:02] Speaker A: You know, part of what we're doing, we're working with some universities now and when they do the, the application, part of that application is authentication.
You know, everybody generally has some sort of government issued id which then is part of the process to enroll or you know, get the student aid will authenticate that id. And at the same time, we even make it easy for the student because we populate the application with all the information that came off of that government issued id.
And it's, it's relatively inexpensive. It is very, very easy to do. All you need to do is use your phone as a scanner and scan the driver's license. Piece of cake.
So very quick and very, very effective. Right. If you are good at ID authentication, you know, we're talking to our clients for running at 99.99 accuracy.
So you're going to get into good students, you're going to give the loans to the right people and you will immediately block those who are trying to steal both education and money.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: So I know that was a bit of foreshadowing. So talk to us about how IntelliCheck can help and how they should engage.
Sure.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: So again, real simple. As I said, we are in the process already with some universities of the first step in that application process, whether it's online or they get a form or they start filling it out on a web page, we can embed in that and make it much simpler and easier.
Very simple programming.
We're is not hard to connect to us, but in doing so you're going to stop the fraud. And if anybody's interested, they could just go to our website and say, you know, fill out, hey, contact me. I'd like to see what we can do to stop the fraud. Because you know, like all forms of identity theft, this is continuing to grow.
So you know, whatever the problem is today, I guarantee it's going to be bigger, you know, next year. So getting ahead of it is important.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Excellent folks.
You heard Brian, it's IntelliCheck.com There's a contact page or a demo page. Just go there and we'll be happy to have somebody reach out to you.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: So that's all the time we have today. My guest today on the Intellicheck podcast has been Intellicheck CEO Brian Lewis and we've been discussing the issue of Ghost students.
Be sure to check out the show notes in the description where we'll have a list of all of the articles that we've mentioned in this episode.
Thank you for listening to the Intellicheck podcast. See you next time. And until then, stay safe out there.
