Caveat Emptor or Let the Buyer Beware 1: Click “No Thank You”

Saturdays we provide tips to help you get money or avoid scams and traps

Gloria told her scholarship coach that she had used a scholarship search engine and qualified for 245 sources of financial aid. After she applied for many of them, she began to receive hundreds and thousands of spam emails. She couldn’t figure out who had sold her email address. She did not know that she had inadvertently given some of the search engines permission to sell her email address. She had forgotten the cautions we gave her in the scholarship workshop.

How Scholarship Search Engines Cover Costs

Almost all of the scholarship search engines you will encounter will cost you no money to use. Yet, they must make money to cover overhead and (since most of them are owned be for-profit companies) profits. How do they raise money—they monetize the web site.

They carry advertisements to pay for the service they provide you for free. You will recognize some of the ads easily. They will appear in sidebars, banners, and blocks with “Ads by…”. Most, however, appear in the questions they ask you as you fill out your profile.

You will answer profile questions when you register on a search engine. The search engine matches you to scholarships based on your answers to the profile questions. In recent years, the search engines include questions that appear legitimate. They are really advertisements disguised as profile questions. They may ask:

• “Would you like to learn more about online education?”
• “Would you like to explore how the military can help you pay for schooling?”
• “Are you interested in how XX Credit Card can help you pay for college?”

Always Click “No thank you”

The advertisements will offer you two choices:

• “Yes! Tell Me More” usually in 28 point font on a brightly colored banner
• “No thank you” in plain text with .5 point font

We advise you to always click “No Thank You” when you see it—unless you want 4,000 spam emails in 2 months.

Tuesday we will review the web site FinAid.org that outlines multiple sources of money