• As the opening of the 2025 academic year approaches, scammers are out in force looking to make targets of stressed NSFAS applicants.
• Through fake messages, emails and even fraudulent applications, criminals seek to steal money and information from students.
• There are only a few official portals where students can reach NSFAS.

As the 2025 academic years is a few weeks away for some university students, and days for others, the over million strong young people involved in the NSFAS registration process now also have to deal with an added stressor – scams.

Hundreds of stressed young people take to social media groups to discuss if the communications they are receiving are legit, a key marker that NSFAS is failing to properly issue communications to the applicants in a fraud-filled environment.

Facebook groups where students have resorted to asking each other for help are common as messages to official channels go unanswered. Usually interactions see a member asking the rest of the group if a message they received is legitimate and then the rest of the group discuss whether it is or not.

Fraudsters often target applicants and students to capitalise on the desperation of students looking to study and the lack of cohesive and necessary communication from the scheme itself.

The latest scam, according to the scheme’s social media is a circulating fake notice asking funded students to log into their profiles and verify their details.

This particular scam, however, seems benign compared to some of the others we have seen and covered in the past few years. Usually these scams become more popular the closer it gets to classes, where students are at their most nervous and applicants at their most desperate.

In February 2023, a particularly convincing scam emerged where criminals emailed students and asked them to provide their banking details. This is likely in order to steal money from them.

“NSFAS does not require your personal banking details to onboard onto the NSFAS Bank Account,” the scheme said at the time.

Added to circulating scams where criminals look to steal money or personal information, there are also fake NSFAS apps that do the same thing. Officially, NSFAS does not have an app currently up and running at this time.

Examples include NSFAS SA, NSFAS Help and Appeals, NSFAS Inspect, My NSFAS, and a highly convincing application called just NSFAS. Some of these fake apps are many years old and have ratings and hundreds of downloads.

They are all freely available on the Google Play Store, despite being completely fraudulent and most likely used to farm information including IDs, proof of income, information about your SASSA status, academic information, mobile number and personal images to sell on the dark web.

The only trusted, official channels include the MyNSFAS website and its account on X and Instagram. Applicants should consider all others to be fraudulent.