Well, at least he was trying to go somewhere nice.
Brandon Frere, the chief executive and founder of Ameritech Financial, a student loan debt relief company, was caught and arrested at San Francisco International Airport last week as he was trying to board a flight to Cancun after he was charged with bilking $28 million from individuals.
Frere, who was charged with wire fraud last week, and his firms have been under investigation for some time. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission charged Frere and his companies with violating the FTC Act and the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule for falsely promising that customers’ payments would go toward paying off their unpaid student loans. None of the payments made by customers of Frere’s companies went toward paying off anything, according to the FTC.
The 41-year-old fashioned himself a visionary and told employees that by 2021, the company would have kiosks and branches across the country, similar to tax preparation service H&R Block. Frere is the first person to be arrested in the FTC’s Operation Game of Loans, which is cracking down on student loan debt relief companies.
Hours before a judge signed an order preventing company executives from removing any assets from the company, Frere allegedly transferred $400,000 out of the company, putting $179,000 in his personal bank account, $30,000 in a family account, and sending the rest to his lawyers, according to a published report.
Frere’s company was described as a “soul-crushing” place to work because of the sales quotas employees were required to make, or they were fired. Employees were told to find the one specific worry of an individual and hone in on that by showing how signing up for the debt relief program would solve that problem.
In one case, a 60-year-old man who was a customer of Frere’s company found out that it had told his student loan servicer that the man had 11 dependents, which reduced his monthly loan payment to nothing. The man had no dependents.
