How did the program try to get students to interact with each other and with faculty?
Piazza (forums) and office hours (bluejeans--think youtube livestreams but on a proprietary platform.
For me, this semester, I finished a group project where we coordinated over slack/google hangouts. After that project, I didn't have anything left to finish the semester. I felt like I was done because the reinforcement loops I get from work (virtual back-clapping) were done and I had a hard time separating that from the "here's the next task. Also no one is talking to you about what needs to be done."
I doubt very much of that 793M makes it to any of the people pulling these scams. It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top, in order to maintain power and sell national resources to the US/EU and others at very low prices.
The Dictators Handbook by Mesquita and Smith go into more details on how this works.
Wouldn't those be exactly the people you need in order to stop these scams?