New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has settled his investigation into a Florida-based student lender with ties to Kansas University.

Student Financial Services, also known as University Financial Services, had marketing and sponsorship deals with 63 colleges and universities. Some of those deals, Cuomo said, duped students into choosing loans that were not beneficial to them.

“When lenders use deceptive techniques to advertise their loans, they are playing a dangerous game with a student’s future,” Cuomo said in a statement released Tuesday.

UFS was a sponsor of KU athletics through an agreement with Host Communications, which handles KU’s media and marketing. KU ended the sponsorship with UFS when the investigation became public.

KU Associate Athletic Director Jim Marchiony said Wednesday that UFS contacted KU several weeks ago to let the university know that it was no longer working with Host.

As part of the settlement, UFS will no longer maintain relationships with the 63 colleges as well as with five sports marketing companies, like Host. UFS also agreed to launch an education print advertising campaign in the top-circulating newspapers at each of the 63 schools where it had contracts and it agreed to end the practice of providing cash bonuses to students who refer their friends to UFS.

“If anybody is doing anything to deliberately dupe students, or if somebody is doing something that is not in the best interest of the students, it’s important to know that,” Marchiony said.

That being said, Marchiony said KU’s relationship with UFS was benign, much like KU has with local grocery stores and car dealerships. KU no longer has a relationship with any lenders like UFS.

And while KU is supportive of eliminating bad lender practices, Marchiony said KU remains upset by the way Cuomo handled the investigation.

“We haven’t heard from the attorney general’s office – period. That was our whole complaint about this,” he said. “They took a shotgun approach and did little or no homework – at least in our case did no homework – and all of the sudden we’re lumped in with dozens of other schools that may or may not have had anything to do with this.”