When you get home at 4 a.m. from the late shift at your third job and the electricity's off in your shitty apartment, no one would fault you for cursing the educational system that put you there. After all, the average student from the graduating class of 2016 is $37,172 in the hole, a six percent increase from last year. And who do they owe? Student loan creditors, who, at this very moment, are laughing maniacally because the insanely high interest rates on their loans means grads are likely to be paying them off for life.
Well, guess who's laughing now? You are, because thanks to a number of large debtors having absolutely no idea how to keep track of paperwork, you may be getting your student loan balance zeroed for doing nothing more than simply existing.
According to the New York Times, tens of thousands of students who took out private education loans to attend college are eligible to have their debts obliterated because the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, a series of trusts that contain private student loans packaged and sold as investment vehicles, can't prove that it owns their loans.
National Collegiate has been suing students — at the rate of four per day — over defaulted loans in order to collect the cash they're supposedly owed. However, in doing so, they've called attention to their shoddy practices — no matter how hard they try, they just can't seem to come up with the necessary paperwork that proves students owe them money in court. In addition to losing paperwork, National Collegiate will also make things up. In one case, they even claimed a woman owed them money for a college she never attended.
As such, judges have begun to dismiss their lawsuits at an increasing rate, inciting a massive investigation into whether the National Collegiate actually owns the massive amounts of student loans they say they do … of if they're just making it up.
If National Collegiate continues to fail to provide the necessary paperwork, up to $5 billion in private education loans could be forgiven.
So far, National Collegiate has not made any redeeming statements or moves to improve their practices, other than one of their beneficial owners Donald Uderitz saying, "We don’t want National Collegiate to be the poster boy of bad practices in student loan collections" and admitting that it's fraud to claim people owe money on loans they don't.
If you're being sued by National Collegiate — and about 800 people are — fight back. They've been known to drop a case once a borrower contests the charges, so make sure you've got a bulldog of a lawyer and the burning desire to not pay someone $69,000 for no reason and you might just make it out okay, kid.
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