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Every day, the FTC is working to protect people from fraud. Today, the FTC announced that it returned $30 million in one of these cases.

 

The FTC reached a settlement with Career Education Corp. (CEC) over how the company promoted its schools. According to the FTC, CEC bought sales leads from companies that used deceptive websites to collect people’s contact information. The websites seemed to offer help finding jobs, enlisting in the military, and getting government benefits. Instead, the FTC says CEC used the information collected by these websites to make high-pressure sales calls to market its schools.

 

The FTC is mailing 8,050 checks averaging more than $3,700 each to people who paid thousands of dollars to CEC after engaging with one of these websites. The checks will expire 90 days after mailing, on September 9, 2021. If you have questions about these refunds, call      1-833-916-3603.

 

The FTC’s interactive map shows how much money and how many checks the FTC mailed to each state in this case, as well as in other recent FTC cases. There are also details about the FTC’s refund process and a list of recent cases that resulted in refunds at ftc.gov/refunds.

 

If you want to report a fraud, scam, or bad business practice to the FTC, visit ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

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The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.

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CaitlinS
August 27, 2021
I didn't even know about this. I was deceived by Sanford-Brown University and false promises. I'm still paying off the student loans from it.