04/17/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/17/2024 11:02
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an order against BloomTech and its CEO, Austen Allred, for deceiving students about the cost of loans and making false claims about graduates' hiring rates. The CFPB found that BloomTech and Allred falsely told students the school's "income share" agreement contracts were not loans, when in fact the agreements were loans carrying an average finance charge of around $4,000. BloomTech and Allred lured prospective enrollees with inflated promises of job-placement rates as high as 86 percent, when the company's internal metrics showed placement rates closer to 50 percent and in some cases as low as 30 percent. The order permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years. The CFPB is also ordering BloomTech and Allred to cease collecting payments on income share loans for graduates who did not have a qualifying job, eliminate finance changes for certain agreements, and allow students the option to withdraw without penalty. BloomTech and Allred must also pay over $164,000 in civil penalties, which will be deposited in the CFPB's victims relief fund.
"BloomTech and its CEO sought to drive students toward income share loans that were marketed as risk-free, but in fact carried significant finance charges and many of the same risks as other credit products," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. "Today's action underscores our increased focus on investigating individual executives and, when appropriate, charging them with breaking the law."
BloomTech is a for-profit vocational school that is headquartered in San Francisco and owned primarily by Allred and various Silicon Valley venture-capital funds. Allred founded the company as the Lambda School in 2017, and rebranded it as BloomTech or the Bloom Institute of Technology in 2022.
BloomTech operates short-term, typically six-to-nine-month training programs in areas such as web development, data science, and backend engineering. Since 2017, BloomTech originated at least 11,000 income share loans, with most of BloomTech students funding their tuition with these loans. Under almost all these loans, students who earn more than $50,000 in a related field are required to pay BloomTech 17 percent of their pre-tax income each month until they make 24 payments or hit a "cap" of $30,000 in total payments.
The CFPB found that BloomTech students were lured with false promises and deceptive marketing. BloomTech and Allred:
Enforcement Action
Under the Consumer Financial Protection Act (CFPA), the CFPB has the authority to take action against institutions violating consumer financial laws, including engaging in unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices. The CFPB found that BloomTech and Allred used deceptive statements and took unreasonable advantage of consumers' reasonable reliance on BloomTech to act in their interests.
Under the CFPB's order, BloomTech and Allred must:
Consumers can also submit complaints about financial products or services by visiting the CFPB's website or by calling (855) 411-CFPB (2372).
Employees of companies who they believe their company has violated federal consumer financial laws are encouraged to send information about what they know to [email protected].