In what can only be described as inevitable, the FBI is warning those eligible for student loan debt relief to keep an eye out for scammers trying to take advantage of President’s Biden program.
The White House announced limited student loan debt forgiveness in August, with qualifying individuals and joint filers each able to get up to $10,000 of student loan debt forgiven, or double that amount if the person was awarded Pell grants for low-income students.
As is often the case when these sorts of scams crop up, aspiring cybercriminals quickly start “contacting potential victims via phone, email, mail, text, websites, or other online chat services,” the FBI said Tuesday.
The objective of student loan forgiveness scams are likely familiar: the FBI said fraudsters intend to either get paid for a service they’ve no intent to render, or to collect personally identifiable information (PII) for use in future crimes. We imagine this would be achieved by contacting someone interested in getting some of their student loans forgiven and, by pretending to be a government or bank official, tricking the mark into handing over their personal info to ostensibly arrange that forgiveness.
