In these times of corporate greed and deceit, it seems that even students trying to better themselves through education are not safe.
SLM Financial, a subsidiary company of Sallie Mae, is in reality a front for a carefully crafted criminal enterprise designed to rob students of their hard-earned money. Over the past few years, SLM has been hog wild scamming people across at least 15 states by arranging loans for them with disreputable and/or unlicensed schools the bank knew would fail, and then hounding the students to continue payments on debts that, by law, were not enforceable.
I was a student enrolled at AmeriTrain, Inc., a regional training company that recently defrauded over 500 students of more than $5 million in tuition by taking enrollments and then suddenly closing without warning. I have received credible reports that SLM Financial actively participated in the conspiracy to defraud students by paying kickbacks to AmeriTrain officials in exchange for being the school's primary lender. SLM has repeatedly informed AmeriTrain students that there is no recourse for reimbursement and continues to obligate them to make payments on loans for training services that have not been received.
The story is the same with Solid Computer Decisions (SCD), another disreputable training company with which SLM Financial served as the lender. Like AmeriTrain after it, SCD coordinated the scam with SLM across several states.in Virginia, SCD was never a real school and was not licensed by the state. The Virginia Department of Education explicitly warned Sallie Mae of the licensing requirement and that the bank was not arrange loans for non-licensed schools; Sallie Mae ignored the state and went ahead anyway. When SCD closed its doors, SLM continued to hold students to loans which were never legally enforceable.
Under both Virginia statute law and Virginia case law, any contract for tuition created by an unlicensed school is unenforceable. Additionally, Federal law holds that the obligation to any loan ceases when the seller of the goods, in this case SCD, in my case AmeriTrain, no longer exists. SLM Financial and its lawyers were quite well aware of both these laws, yet the company continued to squeeze borrowers by lying to them, telling them the loans were still binding. As evidence of its premeditated criminal intent, SLM included an "arbitration clause" and an agreement not to be part of any class action in the loan agreements the students signed, both of which were designed to shield the bank from the lawsuits it knew would follow if the scam was revealed.
As a respected and well known name, Sallie Mae itself could never hope to successfully engineer such a scam. Because Sallie Mae deals only with federal loans and is subjected to federal oversight, it knows that any hanky-panky on its part would be difficult and dangerous. Hence, the creation of SLM Financial, a "subsidiary", which coincidentally deals only with non-Federal loans, and always uses out-of-state banks to funnel money to fund the loans, thus skirting state laws as well as federal laws. And, as was the case with AmeriTrain, SLM always makes sure the students never receive a dime, but instead disburses to the disreputable schools it does business with all of the money in one gigantic lump sum, in violation of both the stated policies of the banks, the states, and common sense.
Fortuneately, a few lawyers have decided to challenge Sallie Mae, despite the arbitration clause. Additionally, AmeriTrain students have organized across five states and have obtained legal counsel of their own. Everyone can rest assured that Sallie Mae's outrageous criminal conduct will be fully exposed, and that justice will be done for all the students the bank has robbed.
Marshall
Haymarket, Virginia
U.S.A.
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