Career Step Settlement: $27.8 Million in Cancelled Debt and $15.5 Million in Refunds

Who qualifies

• Two separate groups were compensated in two different ways, and nobody received both.
• Debt cancellation went to current or former students with unpaid balances owed to Career Step who enrolled between February 2020 and February 2023. Career Step notified this group by letter in August 2024. The cancellation covered nearly $28 million and applied only to money owed to Career Step itself.
• Cash refunds went to people who enrolled and paid for training between August 7, 2018 and September 11, 2024 and who did not receive debt cancellation. The FTC sent checks and PayPal payments to 42,794 of them on March 12, 2025.
• Federal student loans, private student loans and military education benefits were explicitly not touched by this settlement. If you funded a Career Step program with a federal loan or with military tuition assistance, that obligation was unaffected — a limitation worth knowing, since military benefits were how many of these enrollments were paid for in the first place.
• No claim form existed for either remedy. The FTC and Career Step both worked from company records. If you believe you qualified for a refund and did not receive one, the refund administrator, Simpluris, at 866-675-2824 is the correct contact.

What Career Step told students, and what the FTC found

1. 1

   Who Career Step targeted

   Career Step, LLC is a Georgia-based online company offering career training and certification programs for healthcare jobs. According to the FTC's complaint, since at least 2019 it has specifically targeted servicemembers and their spouses, marketing through social media, its own website, military-focused publications such as Military.com, and events sponsored by the military including job fairs. It used sales representatives and AI technology to persuade consumers to enrol. Samuel Levine, then Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said of the case that servicemembers and their families "make sacrifices every day" and that when they use hard-earned benefits for education they should "get facts and not fantasy."

2. 2

   Claim 1 — the job placement that did not exist

   Career Step representatives falsely promised to find consumers jobs, telling them a "career placement team" would step in and find them the "perfect job." The FTC found that Career Step does not provide any job placement whatsoever. Its job-search assistance consists of help with drafting a resume and emailing links to job postings that are generally available on the internet to anyone.

3. 3

   Claim 2 — the 80% employment statistic

   Career Step represented that "most learners" and "more than 80% of its graduates" were employed in their field of study. Those figures came entirely from an optional survey sent only to people who had finished their program. Most enrollees never complete the program and so never receive the survey at all, and of those who do receive it, most never respond. The FTC gives the numbers from a 2020 survey: out of 9,330 enrollees and 2,126 program-completers, only 5% of enrollees — 24% of completers — filled it in. An 80% figure drawn from that pool describes almost nobody.

4. 4

   Claim 3 — the hiring partners

   Career Step's website claimed partnerships with leading healthcare businesses to provide jobs for its graduates, prominently featuring the logos of well-known "Hiring Partners" such as CVS and Walgreens on its homepage. Sales representatives told consumers, "We have over 50,000 partnerships so we'll help you find some place to work." According to the FTC, Career Step's agreements — including those with CVS and Walgreens — have nothing to do with job placement after graduation.

5. 5

   Claim 4 — the externships

   Career Step told students it would place them in an externship as part of their program. The complaint states that less than 10 percent of students in externship-required programs were ever placed in one. Without the externship, those students could not complete their programs at all — so the failure did not merely disappoint them, it stranded them partway through a course they had paid for.

6. 6

   Claim 5 — the incentivized reviews

   The FTC also found Career Step offered "free" program extensions in exchange for posting reviews online. Those incentivized reviews were then used to promote the company's services — meaning the favorable feedback prospective students read had been purchased with course time rather than earned.

7. 7

   July and August 2024 — the order

   The FTC filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on July 30, 2024, under matter number 232 3019. A stipulated order was entered on August 8, 2024 requiring $43.5 million — $27.8 million in debt cancellation and $15.7 million in cash — and prohibiting Career Step from deceptively advertising any educational product or service in the future. Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew N. Ferguson each issued concurring statements.

8. 8

   March 12, 2025 — the refunds

   The FTC sent more than $15.5 million to 42,794 affected consumers by check and PayPal. Checks had to be cashed within 90 days as indicated on the check; PayPal payments had to be redeemed within 30 days. Simpluris administered the distribution and remains the contact for payment questions at 866-675-2824.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and official records

Every figure and date on this page was taken from the primary records below — court dockets, agency releases, and the settlement administrator's own notices. Payout averages we describe as averages are calculated from the official totals, not reported per-person estimates.

• FTC — Career Step Refunds page: the 42,794 payments totaling more than $15.5 million and the Simpluris administrator line 1-866-675-2824
• FTC press release, March 12, 2025 — the August 7, 2018–September 11, 2024 refund eligibility window, the exclusion of debt-cancellation recipients, and the August 2024 notification letters
• FTC press release, July 30, 2024 — the $43.5 million split into $27.8 million debt cancellation and $15.7 million cash, the CVS and Walgreens hiring-partner claims, the 2020 survey response rates, and the externship figure
• FTC case record — FTC v. Career Step, LLC, matter 232 3019, Northern District of Georgia: the July 30, 2024 complaint and the August 8, 2024 stipulated order