Stopping “ghost students” and transcript fraud where it starts

A transcript looks like a simple document. In practice, it unlocks admission, financial aid, and employment, making it valuable to fraudsters. That’s why we’re proud to announce our partnership with Instructure, the company behind Canvas LMS, to build identity verification directly into Parchment by Instructure Transcript Services. 

Institutions can now require learners to verify their identity before fulfilling a transcript request. Parchment runs the largest academic credential network in the world. It connects more than 6,200 colleges and universities with 6,700 K-12 schools and districts and has exchanged more than 165 million credentials

The rise of the “ghost student”

Education has become a target for organized identity fraud. According to Equifax, citing U.S. Department of Education findings, “ghost student” schemes cost U.S. community colleges $180 million in a single year.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who works in fraud prevention. Bad actors enroll under stolen or fabricated identities, collect financial aid, and disappear. Then they order transcripts under someone else’s name and use those records to apply for admission and aid at other institutions. Each fraudulent enrollment helps make the next one look legitimate.

Generative AI has made the problem even worse. Fake documents are now cheaper to produce, more convincing, and easier to submit at scale. Many registrars have had only one option: reviewing orders by hand, one at a time; however, this approach is slow and expensive, and it can’t keep up with automated fraud.

“A transcript is a key to money, admission and employment, which is exactly why fraudsters have started going after them,” said Kaarel Kotkas, Founder and CEO of Veriff. “The right place to stop that is at the moment the credential changes hands. Instructure connects learners from the classroom through to the workforce, so verifying identity inside Parchment protects the whole chain rather than one institution at a time.”

How it works

Institutions turn on identity verification at the account level and manage it inside Parchment, the same system registrars already use to process orders. They don’t need a new tool or a separate workflow.

Institutions enable identity verification at the account level and manage it in Parchment, the same system registrars already use to process orders. They don’t need a new tool or a separate workflow.

When a learner creates an account or places an order, Veriff checks their government-issued ID against a live selfie. Parchment assigns a verification status and a confidence score and routes the order based on the result:

• Orders that meet the institution’s thresholds are approved automatically.
• Suspicious orders are held for staff review.
• Learners who sign in through single sign-on or an institution-issued token are verified automatically and skip the extra step.

Because Veriff supports more than 12,500 document types from over 230 countries and territories, institutions can verify both domestic and international learners. Supported documents include passports, national ID cards, driver’s licenses, and residence permits.

Privacy is built into the design –  Parchment stores only verification status and metadata, never biometric data. Institutions get the proof they need to act on an order, and sensitive images stay out of their systems.

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Humans stay in control

“Fraud is evolving faster than the legacy systems that most institutions rely on were built to handle,” said Brian Cully, senior vice president of finance and strategy at Instructure. “Registrars are spending hours reviewing orders by hand because they have no scalable way to confirm the person behind an account is real. With Parchment, that confirmation becomes part of the workflow itself, running inside the same trusted network they already use to send credentials. Institutions get proof that credential submissions are legitimate, and learners still get their transcripts fast.”

We believe automation should support people, not replace their judgment. Registrars keep final say over every approval. Parchment flags and routes orders against thresholds each institution sets, and institution staff decide what happens to any order held for review.

This also changes when fraud gets caught. Instead of investigating suspicious orders for hours after the fact, institutions can block fraudulent orders at registration.

Stopping fraud without shutting out real students

Any safeguard against fraud carries a risk of excluding a genuine learner. In education, where access is the whole point, that risk matters a great deal.

For this reason, the integration is designed to raise defenses without raising barriers:

• Learners who can’t produce a government-issued ID can defer verification.
• Orders below an institution’s confidence threshold go to human review instead of being automatically denied.
• Institutions set their own thresholds and document the policy behind them.

This is how we approach trust in every industry we serve: stop bad actors while keeping friction as low as possible for honest people.

Identity Verification for Parchment Transcript Services entered a pilot program in August 2026. General availability is planned for November 2026 in the United States. 

About infrastructure

Instructure builds the learning ecosystem that organizations, educators and learners depend on across K–12, higher education and the workforce. Canvas, Mastery and Parchment serve thousands of school districts, university systems, statewide agencies and employers, reaching tens of millions of learners in more than 100 countries. Everything Instructure makes is built for education first, with the data privacy protections, evidence, and institutional control schools, colleges, and employers require. That is how learning becomes opportunity at every age, every stage, and every pivotal transition.