Nearly 30 Percent of the Calls Went to Puerto Rico: The Case Against USA Student Debt Relief

The Federal Trade Commission has stopped the operators of a scheme it says tricked financially strapped consumers seeking student loan relief into paying hundreds of dollars in illegal junk fees, with the scheme disproportionately targeting Spanish-speaking borrowers in Puerto Rico.DOCUMENTED

The FTC alleged that Florida-based Start Connecting LLC and Colombia-based Start Connecting SAS, doing business as USA Student Debt Relief (USASDR), along with owners and operators Douglas Goodman, Doris Gallon-Goodman, and Juan Rojas, extracted more than $7.3 million in illegal advance fees and payments for debt relief services that did not exist.DOCUMENTED

A scheme built around a language gap

According to the FTC's complaint, USASDR pretended to be affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education and its loan servicers to lure student loan borrowers seeking debt relief, making false promises of low, permanently fixed monthly payments and complete loan forgiveness.DOCUMENTED Of the more than 750,000 outbound calls USASDR telemarketers made to consumers between April 2019 and February 2024, approximately 220,000 — nearly 30 percent — went to consumers with a Puerto Rico area code, many of whom spoke only Spanish.DOCUMENTED

The complaint further alleges that USASDR unfairly provided Spanish-speaking consumers with fine-print contracts written in English, even though the sales pitch and email communications those same consumers received were generally conducted in Spanish.DOCUMENTED That mismatch meant borrowers who understood the verbal sales pitch in their own language may have had no realistic way to understand the actual contractual terms they were agreeing to.REVIEWED

The false promises

The FTC alleges that despite falsely promising to apply consumers' monthly payments to their loan balances, USASDR's operators in reality pocketed borrowers' money and sent much of the funds to their call center in Colombia.DOCUMENTED The complaint also alleges the company illegally called tens of thousands of consumers whose numbers appeared on the National Do Not Call Registry, and promoted fake consumer reviews and testimonials on social media and its website to bolster its credibility.DOCUMENTED

Officials' statements

"It is illegal for debt relief companies to make false promises and use fake reviews and testimonials to promote a business," said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The FTC will not hesitate to enforce the law against bad actors."DOCUMENTED

Borrowers received their sales pitch in Spanish and their binding contract terms in English — a gap the FTC's complaint treats as central to the scheme, not incidental to it.

Institutional partners in the investigation

The FTC credited the U.S. Department of Education, the Better Business Bureau of West Florida, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, and the Minnesota Attorney General's Office for their assistance with the matter, reflecting how a scheme concentrated on one geographic population — Puerto Rico-based Spanish speakers — nonetheless drew complaints and investigative leads from agencies across multiple states and territories.DOCUMENTED The Commission voted 5-0 to authorize the staff to file the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.DOCUMENTED

Why language-targeted fraud deserves particular scrutiny

Schemes that specifically target non-English-dominant communities compound the ordinary harm of debt-relief fraud with an additional structural barrier: victims may have fewer accessible channels to research a company's legitimacy, file a complaint, or understand consumer-protection resources available to them, since many of those resources are more readily available in English.REVIEWED The FTC's complaint against USASDR treats the English-only contract language, paired with Spanish-language sales outreach, as more than a translation oversight — the agency's theory is that the mismatch itself functioned as a tool to prevent consumers from understanding what they were actually agreeing to.REVIEWED

Why Puerto Rico specifically

The complaint's finding that nearly 30 percent of USASDR's outbound calls went to Puerto Rico area codes suggests a deliberate targeting strategy rather than incidental overlap, since Puerto Rico represents a small fraction of the U.S. population as a whole. Puerto Rico residents carry federal student loans on the same terms as borrowers in any U.S. state, making them equally eligible for the legitimate federal forgiveness programs the scheme's marketing invoked — while potentially facing fewer local enforcement resources dedicated specifically to policing telemarketing fraud aimed at the territory.REVIEWED

Consumers anywhere who receive unsolicited calls or emails about student loan forgiveness, particularly ones referencing a named government program or administration, can verify any such program's existence directly at StudentAid.gov before providing any personal or financial information, and should be skeptical of any request for an upfront fee tied to loan forgiveness or restructuring.REVIEWED

The case reflects a broader lesson for consumers navigating debt relief offers generally: a legitimate federal loan servicer will never require an upfront fee to enroll a borrower in an income-driven repayment plan or forgiveness program, and any communication implying otherwise — regardless of the language it's delivered in — warrants independent verification through the Department of Education's own official channels before any payment or personal information changes hands.REVIEWED

The scale of the alleged operation — more than 750,000 outbound calls over roughly five years — also illustrates how a telemarketing-driven fraud scheme can sustain itself for years before regulators intervene, particularly when the affected population is concentrated in a single geographic area that may not receive the same level of ongoing consumer-protection outreach as larger media markets on the U.S. mainland.REVIEWED

The FTC's five agency partners in the investigation — spanning federal, state, and nonprofit organizations — reflect how a scheme concentrated on one population can nonetheless generate leads through multiple, geographically dispersed channels, since affected borrowers and their family members may file complaints wherever they happen to live or bank rather than exclusively within Puerto Rico itself.REVIEWED

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