Selling a loan to another lender is nothing at all unusual. It happens every day. 95% of all home loans are sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. That does not forgive Nor invalidate the underlying loan In any respect. The borrower just sends the check to a different address.
That would depend on the terms of the loan. The terms for the lenders regarding student loans are very exacting, especially regarding transferring the loans and informing the borrowers.
He subsequently took the companies to court in his home state to find out if they were in fact holding his loan. They failed to respond and he got an automatic win from the court known as a default judgment.
"In my experience, none of these student loan servicers / loan sharks kept proper chain of title," Manookian tweeted. "You challenge their ownership, they decline to respond, you get a default judgment."
Seems simple enough. The original lender sold the loans to some obscure entity, and some time later they didn't even know they were holding them.
Send the check to which address?
We paid my wife's student loans off in 1969, a year or so after we got married. Then in 2005, 36 years later, 3, count'em, 3 companies came back demanding payment. According to them, during that 36 years, the original $2000 or so, had grown to either $52,000, $58,000, or $75,000, depending on which company was asking.
During that time, working for the DOD and NASA, we had moved more than 20 times, records had been lost or thrown out, banks had gone out of business, etc.
Finally got my Senator's office involved (a friend of a friend of a relative) and they finally got it straightened out. But it took over a year.