Back-to-School Scam Season: Watch for Fake School Fees, Scholarship Scams and Gift Card Requests

As summer ends, families prepare for a new academic year, and fraudsters are ready to exploit the rush. Back to school scams can arrive through emails and text message scams, using familiar school-related expenses and urgent language to steal money or personal information.

Fake School Fees and Student Financial Aid Scams Offers Use Urgency to Trick

A school fee scam may claim that tuition, sports dues, lunch balances, PTA dues or bus fees are overdue. These messages often use urgent language and unexpected payment demands to pressure families into paying quickly, sharing account credentials or disclosing sensitive information to not impact their child’s education or extracurricular activities. To be safe, recipients should verify school balances through an official portal or trusted school contact before taking action.

Similar tactics also appear in a scholarship scam or student financial aid scam, which may promise guaranteed funding, loan assistance or forgiveness. Fraudsters may ask students or families to pay upfront fees or provide Social Security Numbers, addresses or bank details. Legitimate scholarship providers and financial-aid services do not guarantee awards or require unexpected upfront payments, so recipients should confirm opportunities directly with their school or loan servicer and not interact with the suspicious text until doing so.

Gift Card Requests Impersonating Teachers Through Text Message Scams

Scammers will also take advantage of parents contributing to teacher appreciation gift cards or contributing to classroom wish lists. They will impersonate teachers or school staff and request gift card purchases for supplies or special occasions. Gift cards are difficult to trace and recover, so an unexpected request, especially if it asks for card numbers or PINs numbers, should always be independently verified through a trusted school contact.

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are frontline defenders against fraud, protecting parents and schools’ ability to communicate. Advanced call authentication, phone-number reputation, spoof protection and analytics can help identify suspicious traffic, block known fraud campaigns and give parents more confidence in the messages they receive.

TNS Call Guardian delivers industry-leading reputation profiling to identify call spoofing and unwanted robocalls in real time, helping Communications Service Providers (CSPs) protect parents from scam campaigns. Analyzing more than 1.9 billion call events each day and leveraging Do Not Originate (DNO), unallocated, invalid and unassigned numbers alongside STIR/SHAKEN and advanced analytics, it helps detect and stop suspicious calls or texts from reaching their targets.

TNS Branding and Call Authentication Suite helps enterprises increase customer trust, improve outbound communication performance and reduce fraud and impersonation risk while protecting brand integrity and enabling more effective, verified and recognized customer connections. This comprehensive suite of products includes: Spoof Protection, Enterprise Branded Calling and Telephone Number Reputation Monitoring. Together, they secure identity, establish recognizable branding and provide visibility into how calls are labeled. This creates a complete framework for trusted outbound communications across the enterprise.

Stay informed, share awareness of the latest scams and explore our monthly Scam of the Month updates.

John Haraburda is Product Lead for TNS Call Guardian® with specific responsibilities for TNS’ Communications Market solutions. 

Call Guardian is a registered trademark for Transaction Network Services, Inc.

Prepared with assistance from AI.