A year and a half ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) worked with state attorneys general to shut down Prehired, a shady tech sales bootcamp program that a court said deceptively saddled students with millions of dollars in loans. Now, as the federal watchdog is being dismantl ed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a consumer advocacy group says the company is relaunching its old pitch under a new name: FastTrack. Prehired was an online program that offered training for entry-level software sales roles, promising that students would only have to pay the course’s cost once they landed a job that paid more than $60,000 within 12 months of finishing. In a 2023 complaint, the CFPB and 11 states claimed that these were deceptively marketed loans with buried terms that left students on the hook even if they didn’t get a job. After students had signed up, Prehired allegedly claimed they’d benefit from converting these loans into settlement agreements with the company, which actually made it harder for them to fight debt collectors. In November 2023, a court approved an order shutting down Prehired and permanently banning it from offering similar loans in the future. The company had already filed for bankruptcy. Prehired was ordered to refund $4.2 million paid by student borrowers on the income share agreements, and void $27 million worth of outstanding loans. Prehired, however, has allegedly done little to honor those terms. Last year, former Prehired students came across a new company called FastTrack, which looked suspiciously similar. It offered the same “member success guarantee” of landing a job with a salary of at least $60,000 within 12 months of completing the program, featured the same images on its website, and even displayed reviews that appeared to have actually been reviews of Prehired. It also featured a page of blogs authored by Joshua Jordan — the name of the executive who previously ran Prehired (the author of those blogs has since been swapped out). “There it was verbatim, just staring right at us — the exact same sales pitch” In December 2024, the former Prehired students flagged the new FastTrack program to the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), the nonprofit group that originally blew the whistle on Prehired. “We did a side-by-side comparison of what we had saved as records of his old scheme, and there it was verbatim, just staring right at us — the exact same sales pitch,” says Mike Pierce, SBPC’s executive director. FastTrack is offering interest-free financing for $30,000 in deferred “dues,” rather than an income share agreement, but Pierce says the guarantee offered is basically the same as Prehired’s. “We knew that was a lie at Prehired because eventually he drove a bunch of students who didn’t get jobs into court and then into debt collection,” he says. “I would assume that that’s a lie here too, because it doesn’t seem like any other piece of the deal is any different.” If FastTrack — which Pierce says apparently launched soon after the initial consent order — is simply a renamed Prehire, “it is likely that Jordan has flagrantly violated the terms of the Prehired settlement,” SBPC research and policy analyst Ella Azoulay says in a blog post. In letters sent on Monday to state AGs, SBPC claimed that Jordan appears to at least be violating the “clear intent” of the Prehired settlement, and FastTrack is “at the very least engaged in the same unlawful conduct that resulted in the settlement agreement.” FastTrack, which claims it has helped “hundreds” of members, could put a whole new crop of students at risk of wasted time and financial damage. Prehired used tactics that “we had never seen a fraudster do before,” Pierce says. That included a “mass filing of debt collection actions against former students” to get them to pay their income share agreements, and later push them into arbitration. One former Prehired attendee is Chris Belcher, a former Marine who signed up for the course in 2019 to get into tech sales. Belcher soon joined the company as a commission-based contractor, marketing the program to the military and to tech companies that might be interested in hiring Prehired students. But he says he was unable to recruit new businesses and left after a few months. That’s when he says Prehired “started harassing the crap out of” him. Belcher says he’d gotten a job selling windows — the glass, not the software — yet Prehired was coming to collect on the $15,000, seeming to take credit for Belcher landing a role in an unrelated field. Belcher says he held firm in refusing to pay the fee. Belcher says he’s not entirely surprised to see Jordan’s name pop up again with a similar program, because he’s come to see many such businesses as suspect, though commonplace. “It just doesn’t surprise me, having learned about the shadiness of this side of this business,” he says. He now advises people trying to get skills to go into tech sales not to take classes like those Prehired offered if they cost any money to do so. “Instead of doing their job, we have watched the Trump CFPB fire its enforcement attorneys, shut down the agency, [and] take the name off the building” Under normal circumstances, the CFPB would have already initiated a new action against FastTrack and Jordan, says Pierce, who previously worked at the agency. But now, it’s been greatly weakened by President Donald Trump and DOGE. A backlog of cases built up under Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Budget and Management, who ordered staff to stop working on February 10th — and a judge only just ruled last Friday that they could get back to work while a broader case is pending. This injunction means the judge believes the workers’ union will likely prevail in claiming the Trump administration unlawfully dismantled the CFPB, but reaching that conclusion could take months — and if a Republican-led Congress formally shuts the agency down, much less can be done.  “The CFPB is supposed to be monitoring these consent orders to make sure that corporate criminals follow the terms of their deals here,” Pierce days. “Instead of doing their job, we have watched the Trump CFPB fire its enforcement attorneys, shut down the agency, [and] take the name off the building. So of course, that’s a giant ‘open for business’ sign for every two-bit fraudster in America.”  For now, as a battered CFPB is getting back to business, the SBPC is turning to state AGs as a “last line of defense,” Pierce says. But that doesn’t mean they’re a sustainable replacement for a federal watchdog. “You can’t have the kind of scale and resources in a state AG’s office that you get in Washington when you have a federal regulator with thousands of employees whose only job day in and day out is to watch for financial fraud,” he says. “This doesn’t mean that the state agencies weren’t doing their jobs. It means that CFPB has a mission and the resources to do its job, and when it doesn’t, people get hurt.” ...read more read less