'Biden Loan Forgiveness' Was Never Real: The Ringleader Behind an $8.8 Million Student Debt Scheme

Marco Manzi, identified by the Federal Trade Commission as the ringleader of a student loan debt relief scheme, has been banned from the debt relief industry and ordered to turn over his assets, settling FTC charges tied to an operation that pocketed approximately $8.8 million in junk fees from students seeking loan forgiveness.DOCUMENTED

The settlement with Manzi followed a February 2024 settlement with two other defendants in the same case, Ivan Esquivel and Robert Kissinger, along with their affiliated corporate entities.DOCUMENTED

Borrowing the name of a real government program

According to the FTC's complaint, Manzi, Esquivel, and Kissinger falsely claimed to be affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education and used the name "Biden Loan Forgiveness," or similar variations, to trick students into believing they were signing up for a legitimate, government-backed student debt relief program.DOCUMENTED Consumers who understood "Biden Loan Forgiveness" to refer to the Biden-Harris administration's actual Student Loan Debt Relief Plan were instead funneled into the defendants' own phony debt-relief service.DOCUMENTED

The FTC charged that the scheme's operators collected approximately $8.8 million in junk fees in exchange for student loan debt relief services that did not exist.DOCUMENTED In other words, students paid upfront fees to a company falsely posing as a path to real, federally administered forgiveness — fees that are themselves illegal under federal rules governing debt-relief services, which generally bar collecting payment before a service is actually delivered.REVIEWED

A staged resolution across several defendants

The FTC resolved its case against the Apex Processing Center operation in stages. In February 2024, under proposed orders settling the FTC's charges, Express Enrollment LLC, Intercontinental Solutions LLC, Esquivel, and Kissinger were permanently banned from the debt relief industry and ordered to turn over their assets.DOCUMENTED Manzi, described by the FTC as the scheme's ringleader, settled separately in April 2024 under similar terms — a permanent ban from the industry and a requirement to turn over assets to the agency.DOCUMENTED

Consumers who believed "Biden Loan Forgiveness" meant they had reached a real federal program instead reached a company the FTC says had no connection to it at all.

Why the timing of the scheme mattered

The scheme operated during a period of intense public attention to federal student loan forgiveness policy, as the Biden administration pursued various loan-cancellation initiatives that were themselves the subject of extensive news coverage and legal challenges.REVIEWED That backdrop of genuine policy activity made a scheme invoking "Biden Loan Forgiveness" more plausible to consumers than it might have been at a quieter moment, since borrowers had real reason to believe new forgiveness programs were being rolled out and could reasonably have expected a legitimate outreach effort to sound similar.REVIEWED

Part of a broader FTC crackdown on debt-relief impersonation

The Apex Processing Center case is one of several FTC actions targeting student loan debt relief operations that falsely claim affiliation with the Department of Education or invoke real federal forgiveness programs by name, including separate cases the agency brought later in 2024 against operations targeting Spanish-speaking borrowers and against a scheme the FTC pursued under its Impersonation Rule.REVIEWED Taken together, these cases reflect a consistent enforcement pattern: as genuine government relief programs generate public attention, deceptive operators have moved quickly to borrow the credibility of those programs' names, requiring the FTC to pursue each new variation as it appears.REVIEWED

Borrowers seeking legitimate information about federal student loan forgiveness programs can find free, direct guidance at StudentAid.gov, the official U.S. Department of Education website — a resource that requires no upfront fee and involves no third-party processing company.REVIEWED

How the fee structure itself was illegal

Beyond the false claims of government affiliation, the scheme's fee structure violated a separate, specific federal rule: the Telemarketing Sales Rule's Amendments governing debt-relief services generally prohibit collecting any fee before a service has actually been delivered and the consumer has made at least one payment under a debt-relief arrangement the company negotiated. Charging upfront fees for student loan forgiveness assistance, before any actual forgiveness or restructuring has been secured, is illegal under this rule regardless of whether the underlying forgiveness claims themselves are also false.REVIEWED That means even a scheme that had genuinely attempted to help with loan forgiveness, rather than doing nothing at all, would still have violated federal law simply by collecting fees in advance.REVIEWED

The staged settlements across Esquivel, Kissinger, and finally Manzi illustrate how the FTC's investigation built a complete picture of the operation's leadership structure over time, with each successive settlement adding detail about which individual controlled which piece of the underlying scheme.REVIEWED

The case is one of several the FTC pursued during 2024 targeting operations that impersonate government loan-forgiveness branding specifically, a pattern that also included a separate July 2024 action against a scheme targeting Spanish-speaking borrowers in Puerto Rico and a December 2024 case brought under the agency's Impersonation Rule against a different operation falsely claiming Department of Education affiliation.REVIEWED Taken together, these cases suggest the specific tactic of invoking a sitting administration's loan-forgiveness branding by name has become common enough among debt-relief scammers that the FTC has treated it as a recurring enforcement priority rather than an isolated incident tied to any single operator.REVIEWED

For borrowers, the practical lesson from the Apex Processing Center case is that any communication referencing a named administration's loan-forgiveness plan should be treated with the same skepticism as any other unsolicited financial offer, regardless of how official it sounds. A genuine federal forgiveness or income-driven repayment program is administered directly through a borrower's existing loan servicer or through StudentAid.gov, never through a third-party company that initiated contact first and demands payment before delivering any actual relief.REVIEWED

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