FBI has issued a warning to all students studying in different universities against the ongoing loan forgiving scam. The scam that is being circulated as email phishing and smishing is actually a fraudulent operation taken up by cyber crooks to mint critical financial details from innocent victims.
According to the US Governments Student Loan Debt Relief Plan, those students within income $125k can avail a loan relief, provided they are meeting all the stipulations related to the US Department of Education. A $20k debt cancellation is being offered for Pell Grant receivers and a bit less to other borrowers.
Hacking opportunists are seen banking on the ongoing session of loan cancellation as they are creating fake websites with identical domain names and sending the URL form links to innocent victims only to gain critical info from them.
Sometimes, the cyber crooks are seen claiming to fulfill the eligibility criterion for such loan cancellations or loan reimbursements.
Slowly, the scam that started as phishing now eased into a smishing scam, where victims are flooded with fraudulent SMSes where phishing is done via SMS instead of the regular email.
As victims are being lured or threatened to reveal personal info such as social security numbers, and other PII, the situation seems to turn into a big menace in the coming weeks, especially with the holiday season in the corner.
The only way to avoid falling prey into such scams is to never click on email links and SMS links coming from suspicious resources. Keeping the device updated with the required OS security patches and anti-malware software and ensure that the financial info you are entering is a HTTPS domain, that are hard to mimic.
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