GIBill.com shut down in settlement over defrauding veterans
WASHINGTON — The marketing firm behind GIBill.com will shut down that website, scale back more than a dozen others and pay $2.5 million in penalties under terms of a settlement with state attorneys general over deceptive advertising practices aimed at student veterans.
Veterans groups and Department of Veterans Affairs officials hailed the announcement as much-needed victory over the tactics of for-profit colleges, who they say have targeted those students as potential cash cows for their schools. Industry representatives called it smear campaign.
The settlement is the result of a monthlong investigation into the practices of QuinStreet, an online marketing firm whose clients include a host of for-profit colleges. Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway said called the company and its use of the GIBill.com website “the most egregious example” he has seen of misinformation and greed directed at veterans.
“This is a public trust issue,” he said. “We have many publicly traded companies taking a funnel of taxpayer money intended to educate veterans, and instead giving them credits they can’t transfer, debt they can’t discharge and putting them in a hole. That’s unconscionable.”
The website, which offered information on veteran education benefits and careers, consistently redirected visitors to a small group of for-profit schools as the best place to use their GI Bill tuition.
State attorneys charged that the website managers did little to acknowledge their site was not an official government information page, or that those for-profit schools in many cases would cost them more money than public school options.
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