Borrowers have been in hurry-up-and-wait mode since President Joe Biden announced a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan in August.
Biden’s plan would allow borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and have federally-backed loans to have up to $10,000 of student debt forgiven. For those who had Pell Grants, an additional $10,000 of debt would be forgiven.
As anxious borrowers await instructions, however, on how best to proceed with discharging at least a portion of their debts before student loan payments resume in January, opportunistic scammers have seen their opening.
“It’s a ripe environment for scammers to really prey on that kind of desperation,” Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, or TTP, a nonprofit organization that monitors tech companies, told NPR.
According to a TTP report released in July, more than one in 10 Google ads for searches on student loan forgiveness prior to Biden’s forgiveness announcement were fraudulent, and the bogus communications preying on desperate borrowers have anecdotally skyrocketed in the past month, with borrowers inundated with scam text messages, phone calls and emails, the news outlet reported.
Kevin Roundy, senior technical director of the internet security company NortonLifeLock in Culver City, California, told the Los Angeles Times that he has seen multiple scams directed at borrowers searching for loan-forgiveness guidance online. The aim, he said, is two-fold: Get…
