The National Student Financial Aid Scheme’s (NSFAS) bursary covers essentials such as tuition fees, student accommodation, traveling costs and living allowances.
Unfortunately, a new scam has surfaced targeting the monthly allowances of NSFAS-funded students and their personal details.
To prevent bursary recipients from falling victim of online scammers, NSFAS released a statement:
Please be aware of fraudulent websites and social media links that request your personal details to withdraw your allowances.
The government bursary scheme has also mentioned that itself and its payment partners will never request a student to share their login details, including the password, or transfer money on their behalf.
Once a student is being requested to share their personal details, then this will be an indication of a potential impersonation fraud. This type of crime has increased by 337% in 2021.
In most if not all instances, these online scammers pretend to be authorities such as the police, government, etc with the aim of soliciting money from individuals that they reach on various forms of communication.
NSFAS has advised its students to treat such incidents with extreme caution and immediately report them to the appropriate authorities.
NSFAS-funded students have been made aware of the following fraudulent websites and social media links that have been identified:
- tawk.to/Bhatala.com
- tawk.to/CoinvestAfrica.com
- tawk.to/Norraco.com
As of 2023, student allowances are paid through the NSFAS Mastercard and one of the benefits of having this card is that students will receive an SMS each time a transaction is carried out via their account and the card is pin enabled which will make it difficult for non-owners to use it fraudulently.
