Providing Legitimate Help to Scam-Savvy Borrowers

Scammers are targeting student loan borrowers. Borrowers are reacting with suspicion. How can schools cut through the noise to offer legitimate assistance?

Constant policy changes and court rulings have generated confusion surrounding student loan repayment. Scammers have noticed and are using that uncertainty to target financially vulnerable borrowers.
In response, former students are forced to keep their guard up. This can make it difficult for legitimate organizations to reach them with actual help.

Is Student Connections Legit?

Borrowers ask if we are legitimate all the time. The answer is, “Yes, we are!” Our team spends every day reaching out to former students and providing guidance through the complicated world of loan repayment. All services are paid for by our partner schools.

How can a suspicious borrower confirm that? How do we build trust in a hostile environment?

Our strategy is to align ourselves with credible partners, make it easy for borrowers to research us online, and educate our staff and borrowers. If your school faces similar obstacles, you can use these same tactics to build trust with your former students.

Identify and Support Your Partners

Your school isn’t alone in this fight. You’re one of several organizations trying to help borrowers successfully repay their loans and avoid scams.

Who are your partners? The Department of Education (ED), Federal Student Aid (FSA), loan servicers, and any private companies your school employs for default prevention.

Support them by aligning you message with theirs and confirming their legitimacy when questioned by borrowers. Provide links to articles and resources they publish. Share their posts on social media. This creates a small network of trusted institutions that reinforce each other’s authority and credibility.

Help Borrowers Validate Resources and Information

Careful borrowers will try to confirm the legitimacy of a message before acting on it. Make it easy for them to do so.

Create a hub page for information about student loan repayment on your school’s website. Include useful news, resources and contact information for trusted resources. This last is especially important as borrowers may search for either a specific phone number or email that was used to contact them.

It’s vital to include contact info for your private-sector vendors. They need you to vouch for them. If your former students can verify a vendor’s identity through your website, it lends the company instant credibility. That will make them much more effective at meeting your goals.

Be sure that any information you share is accurate, and remove out-of-date information. When borrowers see your data matches other trusted sources, it will build faith in your overall message.

Educate Your Staff

Your ability to support partners and help your former students depends on the knowledge of your front-line staff. It will fall on them to guide borrowers to legitimate sources of help. Make sure they understand:

• The dangers of student loan scams
• The warning signs of a scam
• Who your trusted partners are and where to find their contact information
• Where borrowers can find legitimate sources of help
• The current state of student loan repayment

Keep your staff current on student loan and scam news. Look to ED, FSA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for fraud updates. Most borrower-facing repayment plan news comes straight from FSA or can be found on their website StudentAid.gov. Student Connections also offers useful articles on both our school-facing blog and our student-facing blog.

Educate Your Borrowers

If borrowers are aware of common scam tactics, they become much harder targets. You can help by training students as early as possible.

Our article “How Can I Avoid Student Loan Debt Relief Scams?” is written for a borrower audience. It provides practical advice on how they can shield themselves from fraud. This article from FSA covers many of the same topics, but in much greater detail.

In addition, your borrowers need to know who they can trust. Make them aware of resources available through StudentAid.gov and their loan servicer. Point them towards the student loan repayment hub on your website. If you have a private default prevention partner, make sure students are aware of their name and contact info.

You can address the issue during exit counseling or as part of financial education presentations and classes. It’s also a good idea to follow up with occasional emails once students leave school.

Report Fraud

A final step you can take is to report student loan fraud to the FTC. The organization is actively prosecuting cases against accused student loan scammers. By reporting fraud, you make it more difficult for scammers to operate in the open.

Recruiting a Default Prevention Partner

Cutting through the background static of scammers and changing repayment plans requires time, adaptability and vigilance. Many schools lack the resources to keep ahead of the news and offer borrowers nuanced guidance.

That’s where Student Connections can help. We use a blend of phone, email, and other outreach tools to connect former students with our team of experienced, highly-trained Borrower Advocates.

We make it our job to stay on top of changes to student loan repayment and keep borrowers aware of their shifting options. Contact us today for help in guiding your formers student to successful loan repayment.