Waiting for loan forgiveness, borrowers are targets for scammers

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/ [login to see] /waiting-for-loan-forgiveness-borrowers-are-targets-for-scammers
After President Biden announced his sweeping student loan forgiveness plan in August, borrowers flooded the studentaid.gov website for information on what to do next. For a lot of them, the answers weren't particularly satisfying: sign up for an email alert and wait for the application to be released in early October.

Carolina Rodriguez says she's already getting emails from anxious clients worried about getting their debts forgiven before student loan payments resume in January. She's director of the Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program in New York.

"The stress is about to hit. As the weeks go by, the stress is going to be real," she says.

And that stress has left an opening for scammers to step into.

"It's a ripe environment for scammers to really prey on that kind of desperation," says Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, or TTP, a nonprofit organization that monitors tech companies.