With the college commitment deadline coming May 1st, most seniors have turned in their financial aid applications to see where they might find the most money from their colleges. This is a big deciding factor for most students who don’t have $200,000 laying around in their rooms for an education.
The leading corporation for financial aid is FAFSA or otherwise known as the Free Application for Financial Aid. For FAFSA you are asked to fill out information about yourself and your guardians’ assets, taxes and income in order to properly assess you and your family’s ability to pay for college. Once you do this, each school will send you back a summary of how much they will be able to help you out with need based payments for school.
At the end of January I was motivated and start my FAFSA before the deadline. I hopped on Google and typed in FAFSA and clicked on the first link that came up which happened to have .org URL, so I assumed it was legitimate.
After filling out all my personal information, social security number, school, home address, telephone number, etc., another Scituation staffer entered the room and noted that I was in fact filling out a college financial aid scam. I logged out of this scam account and haven’t touched it since. I’m still hoping no one’s going to steal my identity.
Upon investigation, the real FAFSA website actually has tips on how to avoid financial aid scams and how to identify a scam website. To start, you should never have to pay to submit your financial aid application. If you are being asked to pay, it is definitely a scam. It doesn’t make logical sense for you to pay to find out how much money you’re going to pay to go to college.
A lot of other scams happen when scholarship applications come around. Some scholarships might be misleading and you could easily get your identity stolen by entering credit card information or your social security number. “You should definitely never have to put in your credit card information for scholarships and financial aid” said Ms. Rundle as she directed me to the board in guidance with ways to avoid scholarship scams.
The list contained warnings about companies that may appear to have just come into business, or ones that won’t supply a phone number for contact. Another problem with a company might be an application or a promise that fifty percent of applicants will win money. Finally, a red flag would be no proof of previous scholarship winners.
So, when it comes to scholarships and financial aid, you must be very cautious when filing and entering your personal information. The consequences could be identity theft and wasting your money on a scam.