A Kenyan national who arrived in the US in 2024 through the Diversity Visa lottery has been indicted on ten federal counts in Nebraska over an alleged scheme to steal the identities of American citizens, enroll them as fictitious students at US colleges, and pocket their federal financial aid. Prosecutors say Francis Mogambi worked with associates in Kenya between November 2025 and May 2026, keeping 30% of the diverted aid payments and sending the rest overseas; he was arrested shortly after the October 19 indictment and remains in custody pending trial.
Mogambi's case is part of a wider Justice Department investigation, Operation Ghostbusters, into the use of stolen identities to enroll "ghost students" and claim financial aid that keeps flowing semester after semester. Investigators say the scheme has produced five indictments so far, with 40 more investigations open, and have identified more than 830,000 potentially fraudulent federal student-aid identification numbers tied to nearly $130m in aid — a figure representing money associated with suspect accounts, not confirmed losses. Stolen personal data was sometimes sold online for as little as $4 to $8 a record, prosecutors said, often targeting low-income Americans who had never had the chance to attend college.
"If you steal taxpayers' dollars, if you exploit a programme meant to help students, we are resolved to find you and prosecute you," said Assistant Attorney General Colin M McDonald, who heads the Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division. He said victims can be left facing unexpected student-loan debt and damaged credit even though they never enrolled anywhere, and that nearly a third of community-college applicants in California in 2024 were later found to be fraudulent. US officials travelled to Kenya in September to work with local law enforcement on extraditions and asset recovery, and seized more than $750,000 from a Kenyan national's cryptocurrency account in what the Justice Department called the first such international seizure of its kind.