Great news! My student loan forgiveness application was approved!

Because I am old, and went to school when school didn't cost nearly as much as it does now, I escaped with very little debt. For college, I borrowed - and, thus, owed - nothing. I may have borrowed a minor amount for the year I spent thinking I was going to get my PhD. Maybe a $1,000 worth of 3% loan. I think my mother paid it back. The only borrowing I know I did was for business school, and I was able to pay that back quickly. Because, well, business school.

More recent grads aren't so lucky. For a lot of reasons I won't go into here, college has gotten more expensive. Many schools lure students in with great packages for the first year. After that first year ends, they figure that a lot of students will have made friends and want to stay. So year two and beyond is going to cost more. Which means loans, many of them from commercial lenders.  

The average student exits college with a diploma and nearly $30K in debt. (For MBA's, the average debt is a bit over $66K. I think my B-school debt was around $4K.)

Anyway, given my advanced age and my lack of debt, I was surprised to get a call from a scammer letting me know that my non-existent loan forgiveness application has been approved. 

Hey, this is Mark calling again. Agent I. D. 3077 I'm not sure if you got the correspondence in the mail. But your forgiveness application for your student loans was approved. Give me a call back as soon as you get this message. My direct line is 7272954557. Again 7272954557 Your forgiveness application was approved meeting your student loans are eligible for partial or total forgiveness. Now, with everything going on, it's a lot harder to pay back these loans. The department of Education knows this. So go ahead and give me a call back again. That's 7272954557. Thank you.

Now, Mark sounded young and pleasant enough, in a young hustling sales guy sort of way. The mental image that popped into my mind was a very good looking black-haired sales guy I worked with a million years ago. Of course, Mark may be young, and he's certainly not pleasant. What he is is a total scam-artist POS, thieving his way through life and, perhaps, trying to pay back his college loans. That or "Mark" doesn't really exist as "Mark" or any other game. Maybe he's just a wannabe actor doing voice-over work who was asked to make a recording for a POS scam factory and thought it was actually a legit gig that would look good on his c.v.

If Mark's a real person who works in this scum-bucket loan scam shop, I hope he ends up in jail. If he's just a voice-over "artist", I hope he finds a new line of work.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is after scum-scam outfits like the one who tripped onto my voicemail. But as with all such scum-scams, it's like playing Wack-a-Mole. Close down one shop, another one pops up somewhere else.

What they do is lure unsuspecting small-m marks in with a promise of helping student debtors find forgiveness and lower payments, in return for paying hefty upfront fees.  There are over 40 million folks out there, with trillions of dollars worth of debt, so there's a big audience for this type of scam operation. 

Like any normal, decent person, I hate everything about scammers who prey upon people, catching them when their guard is down, giving false hope while roping folks in with phony promises they can ill afford.

The great news is that, even though I hadn't applied my student loan forgiveness application has been approved. The not so great news is that there are going to be plenty of decent younger folks sucked in to this scam.

Sigh.