Question:
Dear Steve,
I believe a friend may be a victim of a student loan consolidation scam. You responded to my question, asking if he was being charged a service fee. We do not know. This is what he gets monthly.
How can a friend determine if he has been scammed by Student Loan Movement? If he has, what are the next steps?
Rose
Answer:
Dear Rose,
It is very hard to tell exactly what your friend is paying for with just monthly payment information.
I suppose that is the biggest issue here. If your friend does not know exactly what they hired Student Loan Movement for, now would be a great time for them to call and reread their client agreement with the company.
This will help your friend get the needed clarity.
As of the time I’m writing this the BBB gives the company an F rating. Who knows, maybe that will change.
I did find the latest review a bit perplexing. It appears Student Loan Movement may have received more credit than the customer realized when they said, “Student Loan Movement is on top of their game. For real! When I enrolled in May of 2018, they were able to get me qualified for a public service program that my servicer kept telling me I was not eligible for. Today, I just got a letter in the mail from my new servicer, Fedloan, that says due to the application and audit SLM had submitted/done due to the recent expansion of this program I had no idea about, that I had over 90 retroactive payments applied to this program and my loans have been forgiven!!”
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is undergoing a wave of government reviews and I’m not aware of any external report that could be produced or relied upon that would change that evaluation of payments made. One big recent change was the TEPSLF (Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness) program.
Under this TEPSLF previous payments can be evaluated to see if they would comply with PSLF payments.
There is no reason to hire anyone for a review of payments made for TEPSLF.
Other consumers that provided reviews had more to say. One person said, “This company is a rip off. They took advantage of my father who believed he was paying off his student loans through this organization. The money he sent them, not one dime of it, went to pay off his student loans. The only thing this company does is file paperwork on someone’s behalf to try to reduce student debt, and then charge a recurring monthly fee to do it. I have now discovered based on his income, my father owes nothing towards his student loans, and once a year needs to recertify his income in order to keep this level of repayment. Yet the Student Loan Movement charged him $40 a month…………..for nothing. One time a year they would call him and get documentation from him to recertify, never telling him he could do this himself for free. Please stay away from this company. You can manage your own student loans, or the loans of a family member yourself for free. Just pathetic they have this kind of business model that takes advantage of seniors who don’t understand how the system works or what they are paying for.” – Source
The $40 referenced in the comment made me wonder if the $49 charge your friend is paying is something similar.
The first step your friend should take is to contact Student Loan Movement and ask all the questions he can about what they are doing for the fee. Also, reread the client contract to find out exactly what the company was hired to do.
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$49.97 sure sounds like a marketing number or the price point for a service. Student loan payments usually don’t look like that – and a student loan payment is almost always an even dollar amount with no change.
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