A fraud scheme exploiting asynchronous online courses is bleeding California’s community college system, and the weapon of choice is generative AI. At East Los Angeles College, history professor David Song noticed the pattern a few years back: students with conspicuously generic Anglo-Saxon names began populating his roster at a campus that predominantly serves Latino and Asian students. Their paper trails didn’t make sense either — students who claimed deep familiarity with Asian American history couldn’t sustain the pretense in their work. The endgame isn’t a degree. It’s financial aid money.
Scammers are enrolling fake students, pocketing the grants and loans, and then deploying AI tools to complete just enough coursework to avoid triggering administrative red flags. Song permits AI in his classroom but insists on disclosure. Nobody complies. “Even with the content that’s blatantly generated,” he told The New Yorker, the rules are ignored. The anonymity of asynchronous online classes makes the whole enterprise frictionless — no physical presence required, no awkward Zoom calls, just a chatbot grinding out discussion posts and essays while the cash flows.
The scale of the problem is hard to measure, but the frustration among faculty is visceral. David Roach, another history professor in the system, estimates that more than half of his students now use AI to write their papers. He’s grappling with a darker question beneath the academic integrity crisis: “Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?” The answer might not matter when the cheaters aren’t students at all.
This isn’t an isolated glitch in enrollment verification. It’s a rational exploitation of a system designed for access and speed, now weaponized by bad actors who understand that community colleges — with their open admissions and lean administrative staff — make softer targets than four-year universities. As AI-generated text becomes indistinguishable from mediocre human writing, the cost of running these scams drops toward zero. The real question is whether detection tools and enrollment safeguards will evolve faster than the prompts driving the fraud. Given the pace of AI progress, I’m not betting on the bureaucrats.
