As someone who was a low-ranking insider at Lambda some years back, it was my perception that the people calling Lambda out presented a mixed bag in terms of veracity.
Someone here commenting on this story said that Lambda counted their student TAs in their employment stats, for example, but to the best of my knowledge this never happened. There were a handful (like three or four that I know of) that we did hire as full-time staff doing real jobs, and I'm pretty sure we counted them as employed, but not the student TAs.
With respect to this ruling, it says that students were subjected to up to $4,000 finance charges. I hadn't heard of that at all. Reading the details, it turns out that's the difference between the published upfront cost of paying Lambda versus using an ISA. The upfront cost wasn't hidden; it was published right next to the ISA cost. But because they weren't the same value, and it was probably more expensive to use the ISA, they called the difference a finance charge. Which is fine, but if Lambda had simply not allowed people to pay upfront, there wouldn't have been a "finance charge" to complain about. In other words the finance charge was already published in the rules for how the ISA would be repaid. So, factually accurate, but a strange thing to complain about, like complaining that the upfront cost of a house is lower than the mortgage cost.
Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing. So selling them didn't really remove any of Lambda's impetus to place students in jobs. (It did improve the cash flow situation, however, which is why it happened.) From what I saw, the goal of placing students was ever-present regardless of whether or not Lambda was currently selling ISAs.
My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not.
One thing I can say with certainty is that all the instructors who worked there back in the day were absolutely fucking passionate about getting students into jobs and changing the world, in that naive startup way. Some of the success stories from those early cohorts are the things I'm most proud of in my entire tech and teaching career.
As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.