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About this tool
Red flags in scholarship and admission fee scams, a fee-demand tally and an offline check of whether a scholarship link is really a government domain.
The fake scholarship scam is an advance-fee fraud in which a student is told they have won an award they never applied for, then asked for a registration, verification or tax payment before the money is released. This explainer maps the eight stages of the script, scores the offer against a weighted twelve-point checklist, tallies every fee demanded against the promised award, and parses the portal link offline to show whether it is a gov.in domain or a lookalike. The reference point throughout is simple: a centrally funded scholarship is paid by Direct Benefit Transfer into the student's own account and costs the student nothing at any stage.
Open Fake Scholarship Scam Explainer on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Under What is true of this offer? tick every statement that matches; weights run from 2 to 4 and four items rule out a genuine scheme on their own.
Enter Scholarship promised (INR) and Fees demanded so far, one per line, then put the portal address into Paste the scholarship link.
Read the Red-flag score, Correct amount a student pays and Host you would actually reach, then press Copy result.
Reads the real host, including the user-info trick where text before an @ sign hides the true domain.
Sums every demand and states the only correct figure a student ever pays: zero.
The national portal, your state portal, your college aid cell and the UGC recognition lists.
No. Applying for and receiving a centrally funded scholarship through scholarships.gov.in is free at every stage — there is no registration, processing, verification or courier charge. Awards are paid by Direct Benefit Transfer into the student's own Aadhaar-seeded bank account, so no intermediary handles the money.
Scholarships granted to meet the cost of education are exempt from income tax under Section 10(16) of the Income-tax Act, 1961. A demand for tax, TDS or GST before a scholarship is released has no basis in law and is one of the clearest signs of fraud. For your specific circumstances, check with a qualified tax professional.
Look at the text between the scheme prefix and the first single slash. Central government services sit on gov.in or nic.in — the national portal is exactly scholarships.gov.in. Anything on .com, .org, .in without gov, or a domain that borrows words like nsp or yojana while sitting outside gov.in, is a lookalike, however closely the page copies the real design.
Your application details, institution details, marksheets, and a bank account number with IFSC for the transfer. No genuine scheme needs your net banking password, UPI PIN, card CVV or a one-time password, because none of those are required to credit money into an account. Any request for them is credential theft, not verification.