Katherine Knott
October 30, 2026
One of the individuals arrested was allegedly linked to more than 300 fraudulent student accounts and received more than $1 million over five years.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it had charged several people and seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from a Kenyan account as part of a nationwide investigation into federal student aid fraud.
The indictments and arrests are the first results from what the agency calls Operation Ghostbusters—a multistate effort to crack down on the so-called ghost students haunting colleges. The schemes have cost institutions millions of dollars annually as scammers fill out aid applications with stolen identities to obtain federal funding. The DOJ said in a news release some of the stolen funds ended up in bank accounts controlled by foreign actors. The seized cryptocurrency belonged to a Kenyan national who investigators say is linked to the fraud.