The parents of four former students of a Government Model School in Erode, Tamil Nadu, have lost nearly ₹1 lakh after fraudsters posing as school staff convinced them to share banking details on the promise of a Central government scholarship. The Erode Cyber Crime Police have registered a case and launched a technical investigation into the racket.
According to police, one victim, Suresh, received a call from a woman claiming to be a teacher at the school. She told him his daughter had been sanctioned a ₹35,000 scholarship under a Central scheme, meant to be credited toward her college fees.
The caller then asked Suresh to share his Google Pay and bank account details to “facilitate” the transfer. Trusting the claim, he complied, and within minutes ₹35,000 was debited from his account rather than credited to it. The caller disconnected immediately afterward.
Investigators subsequently found that parents of three other former students from the same school had been targeted using an identical script, bringing the combined loss across the four cases to nearly ₹1 lakh. The victims only realised they had been defrauded after approaching the school’s headmaster, who confirmed no such calls had been authorised and directed them to file complaints with the cyber police.
The Erode case closely mirrors a wave of scholarship frauds that surfaced in neighbouring Coimbatore last year, where cyber police registered at least 36 complaints after fraudsters posing as education department officials asked parents to join video calls, scan QR codes and enter dictated figures, resulting in losses ranging from roughly ₹28,000 to ₹53,000 per victim. In several of those cases too, multiple students from the same school were targeted in quick succession, suggesting the fraudsters had accessed institutional student records rather than picking victims at random.
That overlap points to a broader vulnerability: once a scam successfully targets one family linked to a school, the same leaked or scraped data set is often used to run through an entire batch of families before authorities catch on.
Genuine Central government scholarships operate very differently from what these callers describe. Funds under schemes routed through the National Scholarship Portal are disbursed directly into a student’s Aadhaar-seeded bank account via Direct Benefit Transfer, with no intermediary call, QR code or “facilitation” step ever involved. No legitimate scheme requires a parent to share an OTP, UPI PIN or banking password to receive money that has already been sanctioned.
Fraudsters exploit precisely the gap between what parents assume the process looks like and how DBT disbursal actually works, using a confident, institution-branded phone call to short-circuit that scepticism before a family has time to verify anything independently.
A researcher at Algoritha Security said scholarship and government-benefit scams are increasingly used as social engineering tools that exploit public trust in educational and government institutions. Impersonating a school or ministry, the researcher noted, is often more effective than a generic scam call precisely because it borrows an existing relationship of trust rather than building one from scratch.
Citizens should never share bank account details, OTPs, UPI PINs or payment credentials with unknown callers, regardless of how legitimate the claim sounds, and should independently verify any scholarship-related communication directly with the school or the relevant government department before acting on it. Police have echoed this advice publicly, and anyone who believes they have been targeted is urged to report the incident immediately through the National Cyber Crime Helpline at 1930 or the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, since early reporting remains the most effective way to freeze fraudulent transactions before funds are moved further down the chain.
