In the Zone or Not Even Close? (UPDATED March 27, 2015)

ScholarshipZone

http://scholarshipzone.com/

ScholarshipZone.com and its sister site, FreeCollegeScholarships.net are scholarship contest sites, both offering entry into a $10,000 scholarship contest for the price of filling out their “registration” or “profile” forms. Here are another two sites that fail to reveal anything about their ownership. Since the sites are registered with a privacy screen, ownership can’t be determined from whois.net. In our searches for information on these companies on the Net, however, shows these sites seem to be owned by Nili Malach, who also is co-founder of Vinyl Interactive, a lead-generation company. In addition, a 2009 online forum at University Web Developers discusses ScholarshipZone’s potentially fraudulent use of college and university logos in their advertisements that suggest a connection between the site and the schools. All of this rates ScholarshipZone pretty low on our trust scale.

You won’t find a database of scholarships here, just a form to fill out and the hope that you’ll win. That the scholarships are actually given away is not in doubt. From all appearances, they are. But if you decide to register for this giveaway, expect your information to be sold to marketers who will likely start to email, text, and call you. We don’t think the odds of winning are worth it.

At the time of this udate, the ScholarshipZone blog and Twitter account have not been updated since 2013.

Related Links:

Vinyl Interactive

University Web Developers forum

ScholarshipZone Privacy Statement

FreeCollegeScholarships.net Privacy Statement

Better Business Bureau (for FreeCollegeScholarships site; we cannot locate a BBB listing for ScholarshipZone)

Overall, we give ScholarshipZone 1 out of 5:

1 Mortar Board Rating