THE LOAN SCAM REVEALED

A former student just popped back up two years later demanding a $5,550 refund, for a program he stopped paying for in month one.

The surprise email landed in the middle of a mess the education business owner in Georgia says started back in 2023, when they paid Air AI, also known as Scale 13, five figures for access to a mentorship program and financing platform called Midas. The poster says the arrangement was supposed to connect an education provider, a third-party lender, and Air AI/Scale 13 as the middleman: all sales would run through Midas, the company would broker the loans, push students through credit approvals, track everything on a dashboard, and send the poster monthly payments as students paid the lender.

"I was never a partner of theirs. I was a paying customer," the poster wrote. "I was a victim of their scam myself."

At first, the setup seemed functional. Then, from the poster's point of view, it fell apart. The Midas dashboard went down. Access to student and payment records vanished. Scale 13 stopped replying to emails. The poster says they lost significant revenue as the system that was supposed to handle everything became unreachable.

One of the students caught in that system signed up in November 2023. By January 2024, the poster was already in an email thread with a Scale 13 contact about him. The student had stopped making payments in his first month, and he had also messaged the poster on Instagram. In the poster's records, he complained that the interest was "too high" and wrote: "Imma get out of that mess. They some scam artists I ain't paying that insane interest."

The poster says the response was simple: "You can't keep using my services if I'm not getting paid, that's basic."

So the poster canceled his access to the course material after nonpayment and says they received only a fraction of what was owed.

Then, two years later, the same student emailed again, this time demanding a $5,550 refund. He claimed his membership had been canceled within the first month, that no refund had been sent to the lender, and that the unpaid loan had hurt his credit.

The timing got even stranger in August 2025, when the FTC filed a federal lawsuit against Air AI/Scale 13. In the post, the poster says the complaint alleges the company bilked consumers out of around $19 million, made false earnings claims, refused refund guarantees, and used Midas to broker deceptive loans at APRs as high as 24.99%.

Now the poster is left with a choice: ignore the email, or call a business attorney before replying, especially with what they describe as a case of "buyer's remorse being weaponized to get out of a loan."