A 12 months and a half in the past, the Client Monetary Safety Bureau (CFPB) labored with state attorneys basic to close down Prehired, a shady tech gross sales bootcamp program {that a} courtroom stated deceptively saddled college students with hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in loans. Now, because the federal watchdog is being dismantled by Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), a client advocacy group says the corporate is relaunching its outdated pitch underneath a brand new identify: FastTrack.
Prehired was a web based program that supplied coaching for entry-level software program gross sales roles, promising that college students would solely should pay the course’s value as soon as they landed a job that paid greater than $60,000 inside 12 months of ending. In a 2023 complaint, the CFPB and 11 states claimed that these have been deceptively marketed loans with buried phrases that left college students on the hook even when they didn’t get a job. After college students had signed up, Prehired allegedly claimed they’d profit from changing these loans into settlement agreements with the corporate, which truly made it more durable for them to struggle debt collectors.
In November 2023, a courtroom authorised an order shutting down Prehired and completely banning it from providing comparable loans sooner or later. The corporate had already filed for chapter. Prehired was ordered to refund $4.2 million paid by scholar debtors on the earnings share agreements, and void $27 million price of excellent loans.
Prehired, nevertheless, has allegedly finished little to honor these phrases. Final 12 months, former Prehired college students got here throughout a brand new firm known as FastTrack, which seemed suspiciously comparable. It supplied the identical “member success guarantee” of touchdown a job with a wage of at the very least $60,000 inside 12 months of finishing this system, featured the identical pictures on its web site, and even displayed reviews that appeared to have truly been opinions of Prehired. It additionally featured a page of blogs authored by Joshua Jordan — the identify of the manager who beforehand ran Prehired (the creator of these blogs has since been swapped out).
“There it was verbatim, simply staring proper at us — the very same gross sales pitch”
In December 2024, the previous Prehired college students flagged the brand new FastTrack program to the Scholar Borrower Safety Middle (SBPC), the nonprofit group that originally blew the whistle on Prehired. “We did a side-by-side comparability of what we had saved as information of his outdated scheme, and there it was verbatim, simply staring proper at us — the very same gross sales pitch,” says Mike Pierce, SBPC’s govt director.
FastTrack is providing interest-free financing for $30,000 in deferred “dues,” somewhat than an earnings share settlement, however Pierce says the assure supplied is mainly the identical as Prehired’s. “We knew that was a lie at Prehired as a result of finally he drove a bunch of scholars who didn’t get jobs into courtroom after which into debt assortment,” he says. “I’d assume that that’s a lie right here too, as a result of it doesn’t appear to be every other piece of the deal is any totally different.”
If FastTrack — which Pierce says apparently launched quickly after the preliminary consent order — is just a renamed Prehire, “it’s probably that Jordan has flagrantly violated the phrases of the Prehired settlement,” SBPC analysis and coverage analyst Ella Azoulay says in a weblog submit. In letters despatched on Monday to state AGs, SBPC claimed that Jordan seems to at the very least be violating the “clear intent” of the Prehired settlement, and FastTrack is “on the very least engaged in the identical illegal conduct that resulted within the settlement settlement.”
FastTrack, which claims it has helped “lots of” of members, might put a complete new crop of scholars prone to wasted time and monetary harm. Prehired used techniques that “we had by no means seen a fraudster do earlier than,” Pierce says. That included a “mass submitting of debt assortment actions towards former college students” to get them to pay their earnings share agreements, and later push them into arbitration.
One former Prehired attendee is Chris Belcher, a former Marine who signed up for the course in 2019 to get into tech gross sales. Belcher quickly joined the corporate as a commission-based contractor, advertising this system to the navy and to tech corporations that may be taken with hiring Prehired college students. However he says he was unable to recruit new companies and left after a number of months. That’s when he says Prehired “began harassing the crap out of” him. Belcher says he’d gotten a job promoting home windows — the glass, not the software program — but Prehired was coming to gather on the $15,000, seeming to take credit score for Belcher touchdown a task in an unrelated discipline. Belcher says he held agency in refusing to pay the price.
Belcher says he’s not totally stunned to see Jordan’s identify pop up once more with an identical program, as a result of he’s come to see many such companies as suspect, although commonplace. “It simply doesn’t shock me, having discovered in regards to the shadiness of this aspect of this enterprise,” he says. He now advises folks making an attempt to get abilities to enter tech gross sales to not take courses like these Prehired supplied in the event that they value any cash to take action.
“As a substitute of doing their job, we’ve got watched the Trump CFPB fireplace its enforcement attorneys, shut down the company, [and] take the identify off the constructing”
Below regular circumstances, the CFPB would have already initiated a brand new motion towards FastTrack and Jordan, says Pierce, who beforehand labored on the company. However now, it’s been enormously weakened by President Donald Trump and DOGE. A backlog of circumstances constructed up underneath Russell Vought, appearing director of the Workplace of Finances and Administration, who ordered employees to cease engaged on February tenth — and a decide solely simply ruled last Friday that they could get back to work whereas a broader case is pending. This injunction means the decide believes the employees’ union will probably prevail in claiming the Trump administration unlawfully dismantled the CFPB, however reaching that conclusion might take months — and if a Republican-led Congress formally shuts the company down, a lot much less will be finished.
“The CFPB is meant to be monitoring these consent orders to guarantee that company criminals comply with the phrases of their offers right here,” Pierce days. “As a substitute of doing their job, we’ve got watched the Trump CFPB fireplace its enforcement attorneys, shut down the company, [and] take the identify off the constructing. So after all, that’s a large ‘open for enterprise’ signal for each two-bit fraudster in America.”
For now, as a battered CFPB is getting again to enterprise, the SBPC is popping to state AGs as a “final line of protection,” Pierce says. However that doesn’t imply they’re a sustainable substitute for a federal watchdog. “You may’t have the sort of scale and sources in a state AG’s workplace that you just get in Washington when you’ve gotten a federal regulator with 1000’s of staff whose solely job day in and time out is to observe for monetary fraud,” he says. “This doesn’t imply that the state businesses weren’t doing their jobs. It signifies that CFPB has a mission and the sources to do its job, and when it doesn’t, folks get damage.”