Dawson v. Student Loan Solutions

Plaintiff Roxanne Dawson, represented by NYLAG, filed this case to challenge Defendant Student Loan Solutions’s unlawful lawsuits to collect on very old private student loans, in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the New York General Business Law § 349.

Ms. Dawson obtained a private student loan from Bank of America in 2007, when she was a teenager, and her loan went into default in the early 2010s. Defendant Student Loan Solutions is a debt buyer: a company that buys student loan debt from the bank that originally issued it. Student Loan Solutions bought Ms. Dawson’s loan in 2017, years after the statute of limitations on the loan had already expired. Nonetheless, Student Loan Solutions sued Ms. Dawson in 2022 in Bronx Civil Court, in order to collect tens of thousands of dollars of old debt—but that debt is too old to be allowed to be collected in a lawsuit. Further, Student Loan Solutions calculated the amount Ms. Dawson supposedly owed based only on an “estimate” of what her monthly payments would be, not her actual payments.

Ms. Dawson is not alone. Student Loan Solutions took the same steps against thousands of other borrowers, in New York and across the country, to unlawfully collect on decades-old private student loan debt based on faulty calculations. Ms. Dawson brought this case to protect not only her own rights, but also the rights of the thousands of other student loan borrowers in her position.