This is an excellent episode within an already great documentary series. Scott Tucker and his brother started a business lending money to poor people ,who normally couldn't get loans. These payday loans have 300 to 600 percent interest as shown on one of the real documents and later is found to be illegal and predatory. Let's stop right here for a second, and forget that I said illegal and predatory. The biggest and clearest sign that these people are living in an alternate reality is their idea that what they did is normal. It is mentioned in this documentary that Scott Tucker was an intelligent and clever business man. On the surface, he looks like a go getter, a person who sees what he wants and accomplishes that goal. With that said, him and his brother's goal was not banking, contracting, law, real estate or any of the multidue of careers that usually intellengent people pick. They pick the payday loan businesses . Who sits around and says "hey that's what I want to do with my life, lend people money at mobster interest rates and on the top of that charge origination fees monthly. " " oh, and let's get native Americans involved ,even though we aren't native americans, just so we can avoid state regulations". Let me tell who would say that. Someone who is only looking at profits. Someone who can care less what they do and how they do it as long as they experience the riches from it.
Now, the payday loan part isn't really why they were indicted. Many people get payday loans knowing that they will be paying high interest rates. Many do not want to do it, but they have to. It's bad enough that they are forced to go to such measures just to survive. It just makes it even worse that a company would pretend like they are debiting your account for payments but are actually debiting renewal fees every month when you don't pay the loan off in full. After paying enough fees that are almost the amount of the loan, they then finally start debiting the loan amount. Then they were practicing in states that didn't even allow payday loans. That was the part that was illegal. They did this until they built up a 2 billion dollar company, so much so that Scott could fund a race team. Not one time did they sit down and ask themselves if this was ethically right at minimum much less legal? Not once????
Even on the documentary everyone around him fails to see that they did anything illegal but more importantly, not a single person around him mentions a single customer and how all of this affected them. It's as if they don't care or don't realize the turmoil they caused. Like I said , they all were living in an alternative reality.
Now, the payday loan part isn't really why they were indicted. Many people get payday loans knowing that they will be paying high interest rates. Many do not want to do it, but they have to. It's bad enough that they are forced to go to such measures just to survive. It just makes it even worse that a company would pretend like they are debiting your account for payments but are actually debiting renewal fees every month when you don't pay the loan off in full. After paying enough fees that are almost the amount of the loan, they then finally start debiting the loan amount. Then they were practicing in states that didn't even allow payday loans. That was the part that was illegal. They did this until they built up a 2 billion dollar company, so much so that Scott could fund a race team. Not one time did they sit down and ask themselves if this was ethically right at minimum much less legal? Not once????
Even on the documentary everyone around him fails to see that they did anything illegal but more importantly, not a single person around him mentions a single customer and how all of this affected them. It's as if they don't care or don't realize the turmoil they caused. Like I said , they all were living in an alternative reality.