Fraud on Campus Has Changed: Here's How Florida State Stays Ahead
August 03, 2026Not long ago, payment fraud at a university looked a certain way. Someone handed over a bad check. Maybe a card was skimmed at a point-of-sale terminal. The threat was local. It was physical. You could trace it.
That's not the landscape anymore. Maydee Ehster, a system implementation specialist at Florida State University (FSU), joined The Higher Ed Geek Podcast at Illumia Momentum in Nashville to talk through what the current environment actually looks like from the inside, how her team approaches the balance between security and convenience, and what she'd tell other higher education leaders trying to stay ahead of what's coming.
The threat is no longer local
Maydee has spent the past five years at FSU implementing systems and managing third-party integrations across the institution. In that time, she's watched the fraud landscape shift in ways that demand a fundamentally different response.
“Technology, as helpful as it is, is good for us when we're trying to do good, but it's also good for bad actors when they're trying to get around it. Now we're talking about people that could be in another country. It's not what we're used to seeing where you have to be physically present. It was more localized. Now it's a new ball game.”
Online enrollment, digital payment systems, and remote access have opened the campus to the world. That's mostly a good thing. But it also means ghost enrollments, fraudulent financial aid claims, and account compromises can originate from anywhere. The people running these schemes, Maydee noted, are often operating with infrastructure that mirrors a legitimate business. AI has made that easier, lowering the barrier to sophisticated attacks and making patterns harder to detect.
Security and convenience aren't opposites. But the balance is hard.
Every campus is trying to make payments easier for students and families while keeping bad actors out. Those two goals pull in opposite directions, and Maydee is candid that there's no formula for getting it exactly right.
At FSU, the answer starts with infrastructure: single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and active monitoring on the back end. But the technology is only part of it. Maydee's team spends real time watching for anomalies that don't fit the expected pattern, transactions or behaviors that just don't look right, even when no specific rule is being broken.
“It's a feel. It's not like you have a specific science. You look for things that just look out of the norm, and then if it does look out of the norm, sometimes you go down that rabbit hole and it turns out to be fine. But there are times you go down that rabbit hole and you find, this is not right.”
Reconciliation, she added, is non-negotiable. When it comes to financials, you have to verify that money is ending up where it's supposed to. That discipline, checking the expected against the actual, is one of the most reliable early signals that something has gone wrong.
Florida moves fast on compliance. That's a competitive advantage.
FSU operates in a state that tends to get ahead of regulatory deadlines rather than wait for them. Maydee sees this as a genuine advantage. When legislative or federal changes are on the horizon, Florida institutions are typically already moving. Teams across FSU attend industry meetings, monitor upcoming requirements, and share information internally so that when a change arrives, they're not scrambling.
The lesson she draws from that culture applies broadly: the institutions that fare best through regulatory shifts are the ones that build lead time into their planning. A change that looks manageable from a distance often reveals complications once implementation begins. Starting early isn't about being anxious. It's about giving your team enough room to work through the unexpected.
The advice that keeps coming up: talk to your neighbors
Maydee's closing advice was something she heard echoed across multiple conversations at Illumia Momentum, and it's simple enough that it's easy to underestimate.
“Talk to your neighbors. See how they're handling it. A lot of things, we think, that's not going to be so bad. Well, when you get down to doing it, you start finding that things didn't work how you thought, and now you're late. It's always good to share experiences because not only are you helping yourself, you could help someone else.”
Higher education has a culture of openness that other industries often lack. Institutions share what's working, warn each other about what isn't, and genuinely try to lift the whole community. Maydee sees that as a resource that's underused. When fraud patterns emerge, when a regulatory change creates unexpected problems, when a system implementation goes sideways, someone else has probably been there already. The work is in finding them and asking.
Three system implementations in five years at FSU have given Maydee a practical education in what actually works. Her perspective, grounded in the day-to-day of running payments and security at a large public university, is a useful counterpoint to the vendor-side conversations that dominate most conferences. The problems are real. The solutions require constant vigilance, good partnerships, and a willingness to learn from the people doing the same work down the road.
Listen to the full discussion here or wherever you get your podcasts.
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