FTC returns nearly $30 million to Career Education Corp. students

Every day, the FTC is working to protect people from fraud. Today, the FTC announced that it returned $30 million in one of these cases.

The FTC reached a settlement with Career Education Corp. (CEC) over how the company promoted its schools. According to the FTC, CEC bought sales leads from companies that used deceptive websites to collect people’s contact information. The websites seemed to offer help finding jobs, enlisting in the military, and getting government benefits. Instead, the FTC says CEC used the information collected by these websites to make high-pressure sales calls to market its schools.

The FTC is mailing 8,050 checks averaging more than $3,700 each to people who paid thousands of dollars to CEC after engaging with one of these websites. The checks will expire 90 days after mailing, on September 9, 2021. If you have questions about these refunds, call      1-833-916-3603.

The FTC’s interactive map shows how much money and how many checks the FTC mailed to each state in this case, as well as in other recent FTC cases. There are also details about the FTC’s refund process and a list of recent cases that resulted in refunds at ftc.gov/refunds.

If you want to report a fraud, scam, or bad business practice to the FTC, visit ReportFraud.ftc.gov.