“A South African student got the surprise of a lifetime today when NSFAS accidentally put R630,432 into her account instead of the R6,000 she was expecting,” read a post that went around on Facebook in March 2026.
The claim has been shared on a number of groups on the platform, all of which have thousands of followers. You can find it here, here, and here.
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme, or Nsfas, helps South African students who are not well off pay for college. The Department of Higher Education and Training runs it, and it pays for the housing, living expenses, transportation, and learning materials of eligible recipients.
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Nsfas has rules about who can get money, and the amount given depends on things like where the student lives (in a city or in the country) and how far away they live from the college or university.
In 2018, several news outlets said that a student had accidentally gotten R14 million (about US$1.1 million at the time) in Nsfas funding from their university. Has the same mistake happened again?
There is a screenshot of a bank statement in the post that shows a deposit of R630,432. Nsfas, on the other hand, says the picture has been changed and “looks like it was made by AI.”
Nsfas called the claim “false and misleading” in a statement it posted on its official Facebook and X pages. The aid program said that the payment shown in the picture was not one of its payments.
Nsfas says that it does not pay students in one big payment. Instead, money is given to universities, which then give approved allowances to students.
“We want to assure students, institutions, and the public that NSFAS systems are still safe and that there has been no unusual payment or breach related to this claim,” the statement says.
