My student loan servicer changed without my knowing. It may happen to you, too — here's what to do

At first, I thought it was another scam.

A company I’d never heard of sent me an email on Aug. 15 notifying me that it is my new student loan servicer. It was the first I was hearing of the change. Since I finished graduate school in 2017, my servicer has been Nelnet.

“The U.S. Department of Education (ED) authorized the transfer of your federal student loan(s) from Nelnet to CRI,” the message said.

I searched through my emails to see if I’d missed a message about the transfer of my loans, but I couldn’t find one. Finally, I realized that I had received notice of the upcoming change in my Nelnet account inbox (which I don’t remember ever checking). The letter was posted in mid-July.

After I created a new account with CRI, or Central Research, Inc., as the message instructed me to do, I panicked when I saw that my loans had been placed in an administrative forbearance. I’d never requested that my loan payments be put on pause, and I’ve written extensively about how costly these reprieves can be, thanks to the accrual of interest.