Separating Legitimate Scholarship Search Services From Fraudulent Ones

Don’t assume that all scholarship search services are just scholarship scams. There are legitimate search services, some of which charge a fee. Services that portray themselves accurately may be very beneficial to families and students seeking college funding resources. Legitimate services will make it clear that they can provide students with lists of scholarships for which they are eligible to apply.

Any scholarship search service who claims to offer access to scholarship funding beyond simply providing lists of scholarships is likely to be misrepresenting itself. One of the most common recruiting techniques for fraudulent scholarship search services is to host a free financial seminar or consultation, which is really just a high pressure sales presentation, in which promises that cannot be kept are often made.

Legitimate scholarship search services will not do any of the following:

• Guarantee that you will get a scholarship
• Claim that you can’t get the information they will provide from any other source
• Assert that they will do all the work for you
• The scholarship will cost you some money