Student loan warning as scammers hijack payments

Students heading to university risk having their maintenance loan payments stolen by scammers, the Student Loan Company (SLC) has warned.

Fraudsters are poised to target their victims throughout September and October as payments are released, with Monday 23 September the most-common payment date for the autumn term.

Read on to find out how this scam works and how to spot it.

Student finance scam

It all starts when a scammer contacts the student via call, email, text or message, encouraging them to share personal information which the scammer can then use to access the Student Loans Company account. 

For example, if the victim clicks the link in a scam text, it could take them to a webpage to complete a form. The scammer uses the victim's information to log into the student's account and change the stored bank details. This results in the finance payment being diverted into the scammer's account instead.

The SLC told us it has halted almost £3m worth of these frauds last year.

SLC and Student Finance England (SFE) send a text to students in England if a change has been made to their bank details. If you haven’t changed your bank details and receive a message, contact the organisation immediately via gov.uk.

lan Balanowski, risk director at SLC, said: 'We have a range of preventive methods we use to target scams, but the most-impactful tool we have is working together with students to stop scammers. If a student receives a suspicious message, they should delete it and report it immediately, but if a scammer does succeed in obtaining personal details, then we must collectively act quickly to spot and block the action.

'Last year, we were able to stop £2.9m of maintenance loan payments ending up in the hands of scammers and we are focused on working as effectively as we can to protect students and their finance.

'Our message to students is quite simple: think before you click.'

How to spot and report this scam

SLC has confirmed that it will never ask students to provide or verify their personal or financial information via email or text message. If you're asked to do so, then this is a good sign that the request is fraudulent. 

SLC and SFE never use WhatsApp to message students - if you receive a message claiming to be from them, it's fake. Neither do they initiate conversations via any social media, including Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok.

Other ways you can spot this scam include:

Poorly written messages - scam messages can sometimes show poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Impersonal messages - scam emails and text messages are often sent in bulk at the same time and are unlikely to contain both a first and last name. These commonly start - ‘Dear Student’.

Time-sensitive requests - messages that convey a sense of urgency are also unlikely to be genuine, for example, ‘failure to respond in 24 hours will result in the account being closed’.

Links in the message - think carefully before clicking on a link in a message. If in any doubt, go directly to the gov.uk website rather than using the link.

If you've been targeted by this scam, you should report it and then delete the message.

 

source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/student-loan-warning-as-scammers-hijack-payments-augHw1A3e5zo