U.S. to Help Remove Debt Burden for Students Defrauded by For-Profit Chain<br />Though thousands of students who took out federal loans from 1986 to 1994 to attend Wilfred are eligible<br />for loan forgiveness, only about 100 applied through the New York Legal Assistance Group.<br />The Wilfred students are getting their loans canceled under a federal law<br />that allows borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness if the schools they attended falsely certified them as eligible for loans.<br />“We hope the lawsuit, and the settlement, will encourage the department to take steps in the future to prevent for-profit schools<br />from engaging in fraudulent activity, to keep borrowers from becoming victims in the first place,” Ms. Greengold Stevens said.<br />“The department has been collecting on these loans for decades, including by garnishing wages<br />and intercepting income tax refunds,” said Jane Greengold Stevens, the director of litigation at New York Legal Assistance Group, a nonprofit representing the former students.<br />Referring to a tattoo on her chest of a spider dangling from a web by a thread, she said: “That was me.”<br />Now, Ms. Rivera has a letter from the Education Department stating<br />that her debt has been eliminated and her previous repayments — totaling $2,000 to $3,000, according to the legal assistance group — would be refunded.
