Fraud has a back-to-school season too. Every August, while families are juggling tuition bills, supply runs and dorm move-ins, scams built for students and parents surge — and the 2026 crop comes with AI upgrades. It's serious enough that the IRS Criminal Investigation division put out a warning covering the season's spread: online scams, impersonation, scholarship fraud and digital exploitation.
Four schemes are doing most of the damage right now. Here's how each works, and the tell that gives it away.
The scholarship with a fee attached
An old favorite that refuses to die. A letter, email or DM says you've been "selected" — sometimes "pre-approved" — for a scholarship. All you need to do is pay a processing fee, or "taxes," and the money's yours. The Better Business Bureau has taken reports of this pitch arriving through actual postal mail, which lends it a nice official glow.
One rule wipes out the whole category: you never pay to receive a scholarship. Ever. Real awards don't charge fees, don't "guarantee" anything, and come from organizations you can find and verify online. And keep your guard up around scholarship ads on Meta, TikTok and Google — ad slots are cheap, and scammers buy them like anyone else.
The tuition call that sounds real
Someone from "the administration office" calls about unpaid tuition and points you to a payment portal that looks pixel-perfect like your school's site. New for this season: voice-deepfake tools mean the caller can sound convincingly like a real administrator. The voice is no longer proof of anything.
The fix isn't technical — it's a habit. Hang up. Find the bursar's office number yourself, on the school's official site, and call back. Never pay through a link that came to you. The real office will answer when you dial it; the fake portal only works if you don't.
The school-supply store that's too cheap
Every August, fake shops appear selling textbooks, calculators and laptops at prices nobody else can touch. You pay; nothing ships. Or the "digital download" arrives carrying malware. The tells are consistent: prices dramatically under market, a store with no track record, and payment requested in gift cards, crypto or wire transfer. No real retailer wants a gift card. If the deal only exists on a site you'd never heard of before today, the deal doesn't exist.
The quiet login grab
Underneath all of this runs a subtler operation: phishing emails and lookalike school websites hunting for credentials, not cash. A student portal password — or a parent's reused email login — pays off for months after it's stolen. Any unsolicited link about enrollment, financial aid or "account verification" should be treated as hostile until you've typed the school's address in yourself.
The same trick, four costumes
Notice what never changes: contact you didn't ask for, urgency someone manufactured, and a payment or login funneled through a channel the scammer controls. So the defense never changes either. Slow down, and verify through a route you found on your own. Type the URL yourself. Look up the scholarship sponsor. Search the store name plus "scam" before you check out.
That's ninety seconds of friction against basically the entire playbook. Scammers picked August because families are stretched thin and moving fast. The checking habit is how you opt out of their season.
Image: Gustavo Fring, via Pexels
