Feds Hit Coding Boot Camp With Big Fine For Allegedly Conning Students

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech -- formerly known as Lambda School -- with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices. From a report: The business, which claims on its site it will help students land their "dream job" in tech at companies like Amazon, Cisco, and Google, accepted the consent order without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. In an announcement yesterday, the CFPB said it had taken action against BloomTech and its CEO Austen Allred for allegedly not disclosing the true cost of its loans to students and allegedly claiming overoptimistic hiring rates for BloomTech graduates. BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, has operated since 2017 and offers six- to nine-month vocational programs in science and engineering, with a focus on computer technology. "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 Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB. With income share loans or income share agreements, BloomTech allowed students to pay tuition later but in exchange had to pay a percentage of their future income, CFPB claimed. The agency alleged that BloomTech explicitly told students that its income share loans (which cost an average of $4k "finance charge" to use) weren't actually loans at all. The CFPB claimed in the settlement order a "significant majority" of students used these loans to finance their education, and alleged each student could end up paying up to $30k of their income to BloomTech to settle the loans. From the CFPB's press release: BloomTech advertised on its website that 71 to 86 percent of students were placed in jobs within six months of graduation, when its non-public reporting to investors consistently showed placement rates closer to 50 percent. Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.

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