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, …