Student Loan Company Navient (Formally Sallie Mae) Is Being Sued By The Government For Misleading Borrowers and Illegally Driving Up Costs

NYT - Navient, the nation’s largest servicer of student loans, has for years misled borrowers and made serious mistakes at nearly every step of the collections process, illegally driving up loan repayment costs for millions of borrowers, according to lawsuits filed on Wednesday by a federal regulator and two state attorneys general.

Navient handles $300 billion in private and federal loans for some 12 million people — touching about one in four student loan borrowers. Every customer may have been affected by Navient’s misdeeds, said Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, announcing her own lawsuit with the one filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The damages sought could reach billions of dollars, said Ms. Madigan, who sued Navient and Sallie Mae — which split into the two companies in 2014. Washington State’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, filed a similar lawsuit against both companies.

The lawsuits describe routine mistakes and lapses in oversight that over time added up to systematic failures, eerily similar to the mortgage servicing industry’s bungling of borrower accounts and property foreclosures during the 2008 recession. Financial companies eventually paid more than $100 billion to settle mortgage-related lawsuits.

Navient, which plans to fight the lawsuits, denied all wrongdoing.

Wondering why it seems like you are never going to pay off your student loans? Well for one, it’s because you got a shitty degree from a shitty school and instead of studying you drank 40 Keystone Lights in the parking lot for a random Thursday night basketball game. But it’s also because the motherfuckers who gave you your student loans, Navient (and Sallie Mae) were deceiving you and illegally driving up costs. Oh good times!

Sallie Mae put student borrowers into “expensive subprime loans that it knew were going to fail,” said Illinois AG Lisa Madigan.

I’m not going to pretend to fully understand every last detail of the NYT article and the lawsuit, but what I do know is I saw The Big Short and I know subprime loans ain’t nothing to fuck with. That’s how our entire economy collapsed last time. And now these cocksuckers at Navient are trying to do it again. Sad! So if someone wants to sue Navient, let’s fucking go. Hopefully we all get a bunch of money back and then can make it rain at the strip club to help those single mothers afford college. A great circle of life.