Fraud on Campus Has Changed: Here's How Florida State Stays Ahead
August 03, 2026Payment fraud on college campuses doesn't look like it used to. Bad checks and skimmed cards have given way to fraud that can originate from anywhere in the world, moving at the speed of a digital transaction.
Maydee Ehster, Associate Director of Financial Systems at Florida State University (FSU), joined The Higher Ed Geek Podcast at Illumia Momentum in Nashville to talk through what that shift looks like from inside a large public university, how her team balances security with convenience, and what she'd tell other higher education leaders trying to stay ahead of what's coming.
Fraud has gone global, FSU's answer is to watch closer
In her five years at FSU, Maydee has watched the fraud landscape shift in ways that demand a different response.
"The other thing we see is no longer is it that somebody's giving you a fake check that they actually have to hand you physically," she said. "Now we're talking about people that could be in another country a lot of times, not even in this country, because that's what the internet and all these digital services provide, online courses and things like that. It opens up a world to people that can be hundreds or thousands of miles away. It's a new ball game. It's not what we're used to seeing, where you have to be physically present. It was more localized."
Technology, she noted, cuts both ways: it's good for institutions trying to do the right thing, and just as useful to bad actors trying to get around it. AI specifically, she said, is one of the tools fraudsters are using to get into systems that used to be harder to breach. Online enrollment, digital payment systems, and remote access have opened the campus to the world. That's mostly a good thing. It also means fraud attempts no longer come with a return address.
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. She elaborated, “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.
For FSU, compliance isn't a competitive edge. It's a responsibility.
FSU operates inside a state that tends to move early on federal regulations. "If there's a regulation coming out, Florida is the first one to say, yes, we're doing this, and we're doing this yesterday," Maydee said. That pace sets the bar, but meeting it is FSU's job, not the state's. "We have to be very compliant," she said. "We're a state university, so we're very conscientious, we make sure we're compliant." That extends past FSU's own systems: when a regulation lands, the university has to confirm every third-party partner it works with can meet it too, and get documentation proving it.
One is coming due now, an ADA-related requirement Maydee expects to affect institutions well beyond Florida. Across FSU, she said, different parts of the school attend industry meetings, share information with colleagues, and work to stay ahead of requirements so the university can respond to them uniformly and fast, not because staying ahead is a strategic edge, but because getting compliance wrong has real consequences for students and for the institution.
The advice that keeps coming up: talk to your neighbors
Maydee's advice for other institutions comes down to one simple idea: talk to your neighbors.
"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.
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