Hello all, I recently won a 2500 dollar scholarship from College Raptor and I am looking at the forms they are asking me to sign right now. I was wondering if College Raptor is an actual legit scholarship provider and I’m not getting scammed or something because the form is asking for my SSN and I don’t wanna give that out unless I am sure they are not going to steal my identity or something.
Thanks!
I found that the scholarship is listed on the Department of Labor scholarship search tool, which is a search engine that is trustworthy. If you are uncomfortable sharing your SSN, you can email them to ask why it’s necessary and how that information is protected. It’s a legitimate question. Never provide an SSN for an application, but there may be a reason it’s needed if you win. To be honest, though, I don’t know why they would need it. Scholarships are not required to be reported to the IRS. You might ask if you could skip the SSN. The reply may help you decide if the scholarship is worth sharing that information (which so many organizations no longer collect).
Of course, you want to make sure that it is the real College Raptor, which is apparently legitimate enough that some colleges use its net price calculator template to build their net price calculators from, rather than a fake one trying to do a phishing attempt on you.