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Advisory committee reports rising fraudulent applications; ApplyTexas to add CAPTCHA and refine high-school list
Summary
Committee members reported increased fraudulent applications—both automated and third-party submissions—and discussed indicators (improbable timestamps, business addresses, mismatched high schools). The coordinating board plans to add CAPTCHA/recapture measures and has enhanced the high-school list to include city/state.
Advisory committee members and coordinating-board staff reported an increase in suspected fraudulent applications and discussed steps the ApplyTexas team is taking to reduce them.
Molly Gulley, senior director of advising strategy at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, told the group "we are seeing fraudulent apps both with bots and with third parties and individuals." Committee members described common indicators: sub-minute application-completion timestamps that are humanly impossible, repeated or business addresses, mismatched high-school names and graduation years, and third parties submitting high-quality but fraudulent transcripts.
Lou Waterhouse (Lone Star College) described a pattern of very short timestamps: "it would be humanly impossible to complete the application from start to finish in less than a minute, and that's what we're seeing on a lot of these." Anna Barnett (Dallas College) and other schools reported that partially incorrect or ambiguous high-school lists previously caused selection errors; Gulley said the product team has recently added city and state to high-school entries and will continue refining that list.
Committee members also reported that fraud attempts appear to be increasing in sophistication. One member said the number of identified questionable applications rose from about 215 in November to about 480 in January, an institutional count shared during the discussion. Gulley said the coordinating board's Chief Information Security Officer recommends limiting institution-issued .edu accounts to admitted students as an interim mitigation and that adding CAPTCHA/recapture will help block automated bots. She noted CAPTCHA will not prevent skilled third-party fraudsters, and institutions should combine technical controls with manual review and data checks.
Members suggested additional heuristics — for example, validating high school selection against the applicant address or narrowing displayed high-school results by the applicant's city — and recommended retention of more robust logging and reporting to help institutions identify suspect batches quickly.
Ending: The coordinating board said it will continue to refine the high-school list, implement CAPTCHA/recapture, and pursue additional fraud-detection approaches while seeking institutional feedback on false positives and operational impacts.
