Why This Site Exists
Where things stand — Aug. 25, 2026
Yesterday KSTP 5 Investigates ran Eric Rasmussen's report on this case. The clip above is my response, recorded the next day. This is the same argument in writing.
Two things in the report were new to me. The scale: Normandale says it has processed about 29,000 fraudulent or potentially fraudulent applications, and that about 31% of applications are still being flagged — down from about 42%. And the tense: this is still going on. I had assumed my case was a straggler from a problem already fixed. It is not.
What follows is my opinion, drawn from those figures. If you pay taxes in Minnesota, this is yours to raise with your legislator, because in my view the fixes described by the professionals running the system are not solving the problem. A 31% flagged rate after two years of announced defenses is the reason I hold that view.
The part I care about most is the legal gap, documented on where the law fails: a person whose Social Security number is used this way has no remedy against the institution that accepted it. I cannot sue the state over this, and there is no mechanism that compels it to do anything — not to verify the next application, not to answer my written request for a root-cause analysis, still unanswered since May 8, 2026.
The incentives explain the rest. When a ghost student enrolls, the college is paid. The money is federal student aid, which means every federal taxpayer pays for it — including the Minnesotans whose colleges are being drained. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.
My fear — a fear, not a prediction — is that one day federal enforcement arrives, the funding stops, and a campus that expanded on money it never verified cannot sustain itself. That would be worse for Minnesotans than anything in this record. I believe in public education. That is why I want this fixed, and fixed now. I am a Midwesterner; I know "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." This is broken.
Since the report: the U.S. Department of Education has discharged the loan. On paper my case is closed. The intake failure it exposed is not. The ask has not changed — an automated check is a step in the right direction, and a person with judgment has to be in the loop.
"A human in the loop" sounds expensive. It is not. Five minutes of a person's attention per application, against the college's own numbers:
- How many applications. "Since then, we've had about 29,000 fraudulent or potentially fraudulent applications that we've processed," Normandale's vice president of Student Affairs said, adding that the fraudulent share "was probably 42% … and now we're down to about 31%" (Dara Hagen to KSTP 5 Investigates, Aug. 24, 2026). Take that at face value: about 29,000 applications processed, roughly a third of them fraudulent.
- Five minutes each. 29,000 × 5 minutes = 145,000 minutes = about 2,400 hours.
- In people. A full-time employee works about 2,080 hours a year. 2,400 ÷ 2,080 = a little over one person. And if the 29,000 were only the flagged share rather than the total, the whole would be at most about 94,000 applications — 7,800 hours, still fewer than four people. Either reading of the quote ends in the same place.
- A second check, from enrollment. Normandale's fall 2025 headcount was 11,465 (Normandale, Sept. 11, 2025). Five minutes for every enrolled student, every term, is about 955 hours — under half of one person.
Against that: the ghost built from my Social Security number drew about $9,000 in federal aid, and nationally the Department of Education reported nearly $90 million paid to ineligible recipients (KSTP 5 Investigates, Sept. 15, 2025). One or two salaries to look every applicant in the eye for five minutes is not a cost. It is the cheapest line item in the building. In my view the money is hemorrhaging out of this system, in public, at a rate the college has itself published — and it has to stop now, not after a pilot.
From the broadcast, not the article. Closing the Aug. 24 report on air, Eric Rasmussen said: "out of those thousands of suspicious applications flagged at Normandale, the college tells me only about 40 people have filed formal appeals to say that they were victims of identity theft" (KSTP 5 Investigates, Aug. 24, 2026, at 4:48). About 29,000 flagged applications. About 40 formal appeals.
Read those two numbers together. Most of the people this happened to have not fixed it, and many do not yet know it happened. The tradeline coming off your credit report is not the end: the loan still exists in your name until the U.S. Department of Education discharges it, and nobody does that for you.
So, please: take it seriously and follow the painful steps all the way through. The FTC Identity Theft Report. The police reports. The servicer fraud claim. The False Certification (Identity Theft) discharge application. Certified mail, and months of following up. I did every one of them, and the loan is discharged. The order to do them in is on what to do — loan discharge.
In my view this is also the only thing that fixes the problem beyond your own case. A college "can't be sure of how many others got through," the report said, "until real victims come forward." Forty appeals against 29,000 flagged applications is why the scale of this is still being discovered on television. Every discharge you file is a record the institution cannot process quietly.
Transcript of the clip (2:03, verbatim from the captions)
So I want to talk about Eric's reporting yesterday and make this video in a little bit of a response. I didn't realize the scale of the fraud going on. I didn't realize that it was still ongoing. This is extremely disappointing to find out.
This means that if you are a taxpayer in the state of Minnesota, you need to advocate. This means you need to talk to your lawmaker. That means that the solutions that you are hearing from the professionals associated with Minnesota State colleges are not solving the problem correctly. If you look on this website, there are holes in the law.
This means that individuals like me and the 29,000 other people affected do not have legal remedy. We are a very litigious country. We do not have legal rights here. And that's the problem.
I can't sue the state. There's no real way for me to compel the state to do anything. And that's why 31% of all applicants are still fraudulent. The incentives are bad.
So what happens? If another student enrolls, the state gets the money. Where does the student loan money come from? The federal taxpayer.
But you and I, we're both federal taxpayers. We're shooting ourselves in the foot. But one day, we're going to get the money. One day, the federal government and the DOJ and the Department of Education is going to come to Minnesota and probably shut down Normandale altogether, which is worse for Minnesotans than anything else.
I'm a believer in education. But one day, the floor is going to come out and there's not going to be any funding and the campus will have expanded beyond a sustainable level. I know I'm a Midwesterner. I know we like to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But this is so broken. We must fix it now.
The KSTP report
Fake website calls out reality of 'ghost student' problem at Minnesota colleges — KSTP 5 Investigates, Eric Rasmussen, Aug. 24, 2026. The broadcast piece is on KSTP's YouTube channel; press play to load it. Nothing loads from YouTube until you do.
The two earlier clips from this page — the explainer and the July statement — are kept, unchanged, on the archive page.
Someone used my Social Security number to enroll in college and take out a federal student loan I never applied for. If you have found an enrollment or a student loan in your name that you never authorized, start with the 12-step victim playbook — file the FTC and police reports before you ever contact the school. And do not assume a credit freeze protected you: it usually does not stop this loan type.
And this is not only my history. In KSTP 5 Investigates' Aug. 24, 2026 report, Minnesota State said an automated identity verification system, funded by $3 million in one-time legislative money, is awaiting a pilot vendor, and Normandale said it has committed extra staff, technology and training. In my view, until that system is running, the intake process that accepted a stolen Social Security number with no identity check — the same process documented on What Went Wrong — is still the one the next person's application will meet.
Not because of the fraud. Fraud happens; that part I understood.
Someone stole my Social Security number and built a person out of it: a misspelled version of my name, an email one keystroke from mine, an address in a city I've never lived in, a false claim of foster care, a transfer from a college that closed in 2014. A public institution processed all of it without a single check, and the federal government lent that invention about $9,000 in my name. I found out fifteen months later, when my credit dropped 168 points overnight.
That's not why you're reading this either.
This site exists because of what happened when the real person called. I asked the system's security office how this happened: a root cause analysis, the timestamps, the IP addresses, the audit logs of my own case. I never received one. I called the system's lawyer; by his own written account, he "did abruptly end" the conversation — and then wrote, internally, that I had "responded with hostility." A day later he wrote that I had "threatened litigation." I hadn't. The same records production that contains his characterization contains my actual emails: I said I would file a federal OIG report, a public-records request, and talk to a reporter. I did those three things. This site is the third.
Meanwhile, the records show the institution mailed its fabricated student — a record with a 0.0 GPA and a 0.0% completion rate — a letter of encouragement: "We believe you can do this, and we are here to help you succeed." The ghost received warmth and follow-up. The human being it was invented from received a hang-up and a legal characterization.
That inversion is the why. An institution that could not spare one second to verify a person at intake spent its energy instead on managing the person who noticed. Every page behind this one is documented — the application, the timeline, the letters, the emails, in the institution's own words. I choose satire to tell my story. The record is why it's true.
I'm not seeking money. The servicer removed the fraudulent tradeline from my credit reports in late May 2026, and as of this update (Aug. 25, 2026) the U.S. Department of Education has discharged the loan — the False Certification (Identity Theft) discharge that was still pending in July 2026. That is the completed path, and it is on the playbook so the next victim can follow it. My records challenge is still open — what is still open. I want the analysis I asked for, the records that are mine, an accurate account of what I said — and for the next person's application to be checked.
I published this site without my name. KSTP's Aug. 24, 2026 report identified me on the record and carried Normandale's and Minnesota State's first on-record response to this case; both are quoted verbatim on the timeline. My name is on the record here too — see about me.
If this is happening to you, the victim playbook is the page to read first. The full documented record — every date, letter, and email — is on the case timeline, and anything on this site can be challenged through corrections.
To understand the case itself: how a fraudulent application got approved, what ghost-student fraud is and how widespread it has become, and why almost no one is liable for it.