Occupy Wall Street activists have discovered a new way to reach their goals through charity – at a discount. More than 2,000 people who owed medical bills and another nearly 2,000 who had private student loans had those debts forgiven by the Rolling Jubilee movement.

The movement, whose purpose is to gain debt relief for low- to middle-income people, had been silent recently, as can clearly be seen by a glance at the “latest news” section of their website, OccupyWallSt.org.

This is one sister initiative to Occupy Wall Street that has had recent success. Some Occupy activists did some research and learned that companies can essentially sell debt to other firms who in turn hope to receive the money from the debtors.

This money-making strategy works for these firms because they purchase the debt at far less than its face value. The company who sells their debt obligations to these firms does so to make a quick buck or because they believe they might get more money in selling them than they will from debtors who might never repay them. To the firms who buy them, this becomes a way to cash in on the money that is owed to that company. They try to claim the full amount from those debtors.

While these firms use this strategy to make money off of large companies’ debtors, Occupy activists – as a spin-off group calling themselves Rolling Jubilee — saw it as a way to relieve debtors at a discount. They endeavored to raise $50,000 for the cause of canceling debt, but their movement took off like a rocket and they ended up with $700,000.

They used the money to purchase $15 million worth of debt for $400,000. The money was owed in medical bills by more than 2,000 people, who have now received a letter from Rolling Jubilee informing them they are now free of those debts, as reported by The New Yorker.

On Wednesday, the Occupy offshoot announced that they had purchased $4 million worth of private debt from Everest College owed by nearly 2,000 students. Everest College students were targeted by Rolling Jubilee because the school had been using illegal and unethical tactics to get them to take out private loans and then hounding them to pay up while they were still in school.

Rolling Jubilee received its name from the ancient Hebrew tradition of Jubilee referenced in the Bible, in which all debt was forgiven and all slaves were freed every fifty years.