Have you noticed how in August your inbox suddenly fills with money requests that all look official? A tuition balance. A scholarship you don't remember applying for. A dorm room that's somehow still available. A textbook site with prices that don't make sense. Every one of them arrives as a link, and every one of them can be checked in about ten seconds, before you type anything into it. Let's go through all five.
Why does it all land in August?
Because that's when the real versions land too. Schools genuinely do email fee reminders in August. Landlords genuinely do list rooms in August. Scholarship deadlines genuinely do cluster around the start of term. Scammers aren't inventing a story out of nothing; they're standing in a queue of legitimate messages and hoping you don't check which one you're answering.
The FCC keeps a consumer page on back-to-school scams that groups the season into a short, stubbornly consistent list: school-shopping and giveaway offers, fake scholarships, college housing rentals, and student loan forgiveness pitches. Fake rental sites, the FCC notes, often dangle discounted textbooks as well, collect a fee, and ship nothing.
That's the season in four categories. Here they are as five links you'll probably see, and what to do with each one.
Link 1: the tuition or fee portal
An email says your balance is due, your enrolment will be cancelled, or a payment failed. The link goes to a page with your school's logo and a card form.
This is the one where urgency does the work. Nobody wants to be the student who lost a place over a missed payment, so the "act by Friday" line makes people click before reading. But a real school billing portal lives on the school's own domain, usually a subdomain of it, and the school will still be there tomorrow if you go to it directly.
billing.university.edua subdomain of the school's own domainuniversity.edu-payments.comthe real domain here is edu-payments.comLink 2: the scholarship or loan-forgiveness offer
This is the category with the biggest paper trail, because it is the one regulators keep suing over.
In July 2026 the FTC announced a proposed order that would permanently ban Dennise Merdjanian, an operator of a student loan debt forgiveness scheme, from the debt relief industry and from telemarketing. The FTC's case, filed in November 2024 against Nevada-based Superior Servicing LLC, alleged the operation pretended to be affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education and falsely promised loan forgiveness, taking more than $45.9 million from consumers. A federal court temporarily halted the scheme and froze assets, and in September 2025 the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada entered orders banning two other operators, Eric Caldwell and David Hernandez, from the debt relief industry.
Two honest caveats on that one, because the headline number is easy to misread: the Merdjanian order is proposed and still needs a district-court judge's signature, and while it carries a monetary judgment of more than $45.9 million, that judgment is largely suspended because she can't pay it. It becomes due in full if she misrepresented her finances. Nobody is getting $45.9 million back.
Three months earlier, in April 2026, the FTC obtained a temporary restraining order against a separate alleged scheme. The complaint against NERD Solutions Inc., ED REF Inc. and operators Natalie Rodriguez and Pablo Ortiz alleges that since at least February 2022 they cold-called consumers, including thousands on the National Do Not Call list, claimed to be affiliated with the Department of Education or with people's actual loan servicers, and used false forgiveness promises to charge illegal upfront monthly fees as high as $1,400, collecting at least $8.8 million. The restraining order was entered on April 13, 2026 by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. These are allegations; the case will be decided by the court.
What both cases hand you is a rule you can apply without knowing anything about a specific offer: it is illegal to charge an advance fee to reduce or eliminate student loan debt. If a link or a caller wants money up front to unlock forgiveness, that's the end of the conversation. The FTC keeps its guidance at ftc.gov/StudentLoans, and the free, legitimate version of this help lives at StudentAid.gov.
The same logic covers scholarships. A scholarship that charges you a processing fee, or that you were "selected" for without applying, is asking you to pay for a prize. Real awards flow toward the student.
Link 3: the dorm or off-campus rental listing
Housing scams work because supply really is tight in August and the good listings really do go fast. A fake listing borrows photos from a real one, prices it slightly under market, and asks for a deposit or first month's rent to "hold" it before a viewing.
The tell isn't the listing, it's the sequence: money before keys, and pressure to skip the viewing. If a landlord can't meet you or let someone show you the place, the deposit is the whole transaction from their side. Check the property address against the school's own off-campus housing office where one exists, and check the site you're paying through separately from the listing that sent you there.
Link 4: the textbook or supply-store deal
A store you've never heard of has this year's edition at a third of the price, or a familiar chain appears to be running a back-to-school sale in an ad or a text. The FCC's guide flags exactly this pattern: sites that take payment for discounted textbooks and never ship.
Brand-new storefront domains are cheap and disposable, which is why so many of them are only weeks old when they reach you. A domain's registration date won't tell you a site is fraudulent, but a shop that claims years of trading on a domain registered in June is worth a second look. 🤓
Link 5: the school fundraiser or giveaway text
The last one usually arrives on a phone: a fundraiser for your child's school, a "free laptop for enrolled students" giveaway, a spirit-wear order form. Small screen, short link, familiar-sounding name.
The FCC's advice here is refreshingly boring and it works: check with the school directly that a retail or fundraising offer is real, and tell kids not to click links in texts or answer unknown callers without showing an adult first.
The same page lists what never travels through a link like this: your Social Security number, bank account details, card numbers, PINs and passwords, and school or social media login credentials. If a back-to-school message asks for any of those, that alone is the answer.
Five links, five checks
| The link | What it asks for | Check before you act |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition or fee portal | Card details, student login | Does the domain end in the school's own domain? Go there directly instead. |
| Scholarship or loan forgiveness | An upfront or monthly fee | Any advance fee for debt relief is illegal. Free help: StudentAid.gov. |
| Rental listing | Deposit before viewing | Money before keys is the pattern. Verify the address and the payment site separately. |
| Textbook or supply deal | Payment to a new storefront | How old is the domain? Does anything flag it? |
| Fundraiser or giveaway text | Personal data, small payment | Call the school. Never send SSN, bank details or logins through a text link. |
The ten-second version
- Copy the link's address instead of clicking it. Long-press on a phone, right-click on a computer. Link text can say one thing while the address underneath says another.
- Read the domain right to left. Find the part just before the first single slash. That's who you'd actually be paying.
- Compare it to the domain you already trust (the school's, the store's, the servicer's) letter by letter, not by overall shape.
- Reach the organisation the way you normally would. Type the address yourself, use a bookmark, or call the number on your existing paperwork. Never the number in the message.
- Or paste the domain into IP Tracker and read the signals in one panel instead of doing steps 2 and 3 by eye.
Where does IP Tracker fit?
IP Tracker is a free Chrome extension. Paste a domain, a link's address, or a full email address into the popup; the free tier gives you 25 checks a day, with no account and no tracking. Only the value you paste is looked up.
For a back-to-school link it surfaces four things at once. It compares the domain against the official domains of more than 120 widely impersonated brands and flags letter-swap lookalikes and near-miss spellings. It checks Google Safe Browsing, Google's list of reported dangerous sites. It shows how many security vendors flag the domain on VirusTotal, plus community abuse reports on the address it resolves to. And it shows the domain's creation date, so a storefront registered three weeks ago says so out loud.
None of that is a decision. It's the boring homework, done fast, so you can make the decision.
What can't it do?
Four limits worth knowing before you lean on it:
- Schools and landlords aren't on the brand list. The lookalike check covers about 120 heavily impersonated brands: banks, payment services, shipping, big tech. Your university's domain and a local letting agency are not on it, so a lookalike of either won't be named. Steps 2 to 4 above are still your check there.
- Blocklists lag. Safe Browsing is strong on known bad sites, but a phishing page registered last week may not be reported yet. Brand-new is exactly when these campaigns are most active.
- Domain age is a clue, not a verdict. Every legitimate new business also has a new domain. A young domain earns a closer look, nothing more.
- It can't judge an offer. A perfectly clean domain can still host a fake scholarship or a rental that doesn't exist. The upfront-fee rule and the money-before-keys rule catch things no domain check ever will.
The season doesn't need you to be suspicious of everything. It needs you to be slower than the urgency in the message, for about ten seconds, five times.
To summarize:
- ✓ Copy the link's address; don't click it.
- ✓ Read the domain right to left and compare it to one you trust.
- ✓ Reach the school, store or servicer the way you normally would.
- ✓ No advance fee for debt relief, ever. Free help is at StudentAid.gov.
- ✓ No SSN, bank details, PINs or logins through a link in a message.
Have a calm August! 😎