More than a year ago I blogged about Hero Student Loans, my least favorite student loan company. That one post has probably averaged about a hit a day, and readers have left several angry anonymous comments.

The latest comment is hella interesting, so I've reposted it here:

Hey, I randomly found your blog on Google while searching for news on HERO.

See, I'm a former employee; I was initially on the front end as a low level agent and later switched over to the back end, doing data entry and NSLDS lookups.

First off I just want to say, if I ever called you, I am SO sorry. I know what lying douchebags my co-workers were (I was old at the ripe age of 25, most of them were snot-nosed 19 year olds). They trained us heavily in the art of manipulation and it was all about scare tactics and getting the social. They made us outright lie to people. When I was on the phones I was in API, so I was one of those awful people who demanded your social in order to get the packets...we were encouraged to lie and play up our supposed connection to the DoE in order to make people feel secure about giving up socials. And once we got those socials? Well, I will tell you that once I had to move to a different cube because my computer was busted, and inside the drawer of the new one were sheets with dozens and dozens of socials. I lost count at 30 sheets. Being responsible I handed them to my supe, who greeted me with indifference.

HERO is located in Tempe, AZ, home to many call centers, and it's pretty incestous; at the one I'm working at now, there are 4 other ex-HERO employees. All you need to know about HERO is that a good chunk of my co-workers (and a lot of the supes) there used to work for the big MCI call center in town until they went out of business. If you know anything at all about MCI and the way they did business, HERO's antics should be a lot more explainable now.

The back end was even more incompetent. My job in data entry consisted of qualifying people for consolidation. Management constantly changed the rules on us and didn't seem to know themselves wtf they were doing half the time. Turnaround time was atrocious. And they treated employees even worse than the customers. Pretty much no one on the phones had insurance, due to the shifty bullshit they pulled with shift scheduling. In data entry they constantly sent us home (we were hourly) around the holidays because there was literally nothing for us to do. At one point they had us sorting through returned packets. When I finally had enough and quit, the Department of Education was investigating them. This was shortly before the new rules came out restricting NSLDS access to schools and students. I have no doubt HERO's bullshit was a big factor in that rule change.

As penance, I'd like to offer the following bit of good news: thanks to the new DoE regulations and the crackdowns on shady consolidation outfits like HERO, HERO is now out of business. MSA Solutions, the evil telemarketing company that started HERO, has even put a for lease sign on their building. See, they stupidly put all their eggs in one basket and cancelled all the outsourced accounts they had from Toyota, Countrywide, etc once they saw how much many they could make in the student loan consolidation racket and poured everything they had into HERO. They lost a metric fuckton of money this peak season. I call it karma.