college scholarship scams

College Scholarship Scams

Right now, many students in between their junior and senior years of high school are getting a head start on applying for college scholarships. The internet makes this process much more convenient for today’s students, and it provides them the ability to access opportunities they likely never would have discovered without it. Unfortunately, the anxiety of financial planning and researching the perfect colleges on top of trying to keep one’s grades up can lead to a desperation that puts a student’s guard down and makes them vulnerable to common scholarship scams found online.

How can you spot these hoaxes and differentiate between them and the real deal? Thankfully, there are some common formulas that they typically follow. A very common tactic college scholarship scams will use is asking you to pay in order to apply. This may be disguised as a processing fee or an insurance fee. Any company offering a legitimate scholarship will never charge an upfront application fee. In this same vein, you may have come across an offer for an educational loan that asks you to pay before receiving the loan itself. Oftentimes this particular con will offer you an astoundingly low-interest rate for a student loan only to ask you to pay before you actually receive it. Legitimate student loans will simply deduct the required fee from the reimbursement check.

Be suspicious of awards you don’t remember applying for. Scam artists will email you and try to dazzle you with promises of thousands of dollars in college scholarships that they claim you applied for, but then they’ll ask that you simply pay a redemption fee in order to claim them. Many of these college scholarship scams have duped students via emails that congratulated them on their winnings but also forbade them from collecting anything before they paid the “application fee”.

But not all college scholarship scams will explicitly ask for your child’s hard-earned money. Some will go after their personal information as well. Many websites will ask that you sign up for an account before they give you access to scholarship information, which can require your name, email address, and phone number. Whenever possible, use sites that don’t expect you to give them your contact information in order to actually view scholarship opportunities if you haven’t researched the company in advance. They may sell your information to third parties for marketing purposes. And never trust a so-called scholarship provider that asks for you or your child’s social security number, credit card number, or bank account number.

You’re likely wondering which websites have established themselves as reputable, trusted sources for scholarship opportunities. All of the following websites are free to use and tend to have positive reviews:

Scholarships.com has been in business helping students fund their education for 21 years and was given an A+ rating by the Better Business Bureau. It boasts 2.7 million awards in its database.

FastWeb.com was founded 15 years ago and was also given an A+ rating by the BBB. This site is considered one of the top 3 scholarship search websites.

BrokeScholar.com is a much newer service in this vein. However, it claims to have over 650,000 awards in its database and is generally highly reviewed.

Planning for college should be an exciting time for your kids, so it’s a good idea to make sure that this process won’t be tainted by experiencing scams along the way.  

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