Nearly 4,500 people authorities say were defrauded by a now-shuttered school will either be repaid or have their $30 million in student loans forgiven, marking an “unprecedented” move by the feds to cancel the loans for a group of students.

“Some days the good guys win, and today is one of those days,” said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who attended a press conference with Attorney General Maura Healey and a group of the former students from the American Career Institute to announce the decision.

“The company’s illegal behavior left thousands of Massachusetts students struggling in a debt-soaked nightmare,” Warren said.

ACI, which abruptly closed in January 2013, falsified student signatures, pressured kids into loans and made bogus promises about their job prospects, authorities said.

The move to forgive the students’ loans, which they took out to pay the $23,000 in fees and tuition ACI charged, is the first time the federal Department of Education has approved a state AG’s request to cancel what a group of students owed, according to Healey.

Danielle Ramos, a student who said she enrolled at ACI to become a medical assistant, said the school “closed the doors on me,” leaving her $15,000 in debt.

Mary Colleen Murphy, a mother of four, said she was pushed into a multimedia and graphic arts concentration, and then was told, once the school closed, to go onto Craigslist to find an internship, she said.

The AG’s office first sued ACI in 2013, under then-Attorney General Martha Coakley, before earning a judgment against the school last year. Healey sought the relief for students from the feds last July.

“They didn’t care what kind of education these students were getting. They just wanted their hands on the money,” Healey said of ACI.