[ev1]

Why are you using an unrelated quote to make it look like your site has some form of affiliation or recommendation by Wired?

How well does this handle rampant fraud? In the past, whenever we've done any form of educational freebie or discount, there are floods of signups (often IN, BD, LK, ID as most prevalent) that are blatantly fraudulent but with hijacked/stolen .edu emails, occasionally faked course listings with one course. There are a number of badly-written vulnerable webapps, often 2-year unis in the states that seem to allow applicants to get an autogenerated .edu email even before admission or any form of verification.

I see the word AI. What AI, and how?

[twazzle]

That's a good point, I was debating on whether or not to put that there, but I believe it's under fair use policy for journalism. It's a quote and not a statement of endorsement, but I get why it could seem confusing. The purpose of it was to convey the goal of my service, which is to have companies use students as a core part of their mission, which in turn benefits them in the long run as they convert students to real customers when they get into industry. Thanks for the feedback though, I'll have to think it through more.

For fraud, of course if someone is willing to spend the time to crack the system, they probably will. The point is not to stop the one off attacker, because the implications are just you give a discount to an incorrect person (which you can limit by limiting the deal - for ex. 1 year discount).

AI because it's using OCR and some proprietary checks on the second step. It is more intelligent than it looks.

[ev1]

It's not one-off, they usually try to get thousands of accounts and then sell them for $1-2 as the usual thing. This is absolutely something that needs to be stopped.