Back-to-school scams that don't look like shopping

Every August, the same warning goes around: watch out for fake school-supply stores with too-good-to-be-true discounts. It's good advice. It's also the easy part.

The IRS Criminal Investigation unit counted more than $24 million in cyber-related fraud last year, and it spikes every back-to-school season. Read their warning closely and you'll notice the fake stores are almost a footnote. The scams doing real damage look nothing like shopping. Here are the four to actually worry about.

The school that isn't your school

An email or text arrives from the district: an "activity fee" is due, the "payment portal has been updated," or you need to "verify your student's records" before the first day. The link opens a page with the right logo, the right colors, the right login box.

The scholarship that finds you

Your student gets an email or a DM: they've been "pre-approved" for a scholarship. To claim it, there's just a small processing fee — or a form asking for a Social Security number.

Real scholarships don't work in either direction. You apply to them, not the other way around, and legitimate ones never charge a fee to release money. Anything that asks for an SSN to "confirm eligibility" is harvesting an identity, not funding an education. When in doubt, route it through the school's financial aid office; that's what they're there for.

The voice on the phone

With a few seconds of audio pulled from a public video, scammers can now clone a voice — a child's, a teacher's, a coach's — and call you with an emergency that needs money right now.

The scam that skips you entirely

Some scammers don't bother with parents. Gaming platforms, group chats, and social apps are where they meet students directly — posing as friends, offering free skins, giveaways, or easy jobs that turn into money-mule work or worse.

Two things help here. First, the talk: your student should know that strangers bearing free things online are running the oldest play there is. Second, the overshare check: those first-day-of-school photos with the chalkboard sign — name, school, teacher, grade — hand a stranger everything they need to sound like they know your family. Post them somewhere private, or crop the details.

One more thing worth ten minutes: freeze your kid's credit

A child's Social Security number is prime loot for identity thieves for a simple reason: nobody checks a nine-year-old's credit report. Fraud opened in a child's name can run for a decade before anyone notices. Freezing a minor's credit is free at all three bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion), and it closes that door almost completely.

Where SAFE Portal fits

Every one of the link-based scams above depends on you not noticing where a page actually lives. That's the part SAFE Portal covers. Link screening flags the lookalike "payment portal" before it loads. The password manager checks the domain before it fills anything — so on a pixel-perfect copy of the school login, it simply stays empty, and that silence is your alarm. And if you're setting up a student's laptop for the school year, the SAFElist and advisor controls let you decide which sites load and approve downloads from your own dashboard.

What it won't do

A cloned voice on a phone call never touches a browser — that's what the code word is for. And no tool can stop a person who's already convinced from typing information in by hand. SAFE Portal catches the first step of the link-based playbook; knowing the rest of the playbook is on us. That's what this blog is for.

SAFE Portal is free to try and takes about two minutes to set up — no IT department required. Get it at SAFEPortal.to.