Payday Loan Stories on NPR


(Hat tip to: Laura Atkins of WttW)

This is almost timely -- I was teed up to speak at a recent email/anti-abuse conference on the topic of Payday Loan marketers and what a challenge they can be, but had to bow out at the last moment. Thankfully, my colleague Mickey Chandler was able to step in and run with it and I'm told it went very well.

Signing up for a single payday loan site's signup form means you're going to get lots of mail, from lots of different senders, for a long time. I've pointed that out for years. Mickey Chandler just posted about it. And National Public Radio reported on it as well. Reporter Pam Fessler received numerous calls and many emails for months, in response to her single online application submission. It's a hell of a story; listen to the various callers as they try to claim that they're calling from legitimate financial institutions located in the US.

In another story, NPR's Pam Fessler reports on why you're suddenly seeing fewer payday loan advertisements on television. Regulators seem to be cracking down lately. In both of these stories, a couple of lenders/marketers tried to angle themselves to get the sympathetic response, but I'm not buying it. One person says, but where else will these people go? Well, you can still give them loans, you just can't charge them the usual 1300% interest. Darn.

Payday loans are illegal (or effectively illegal) in thirteen states, and payday lenders aren't able to do business with active military, since Federal law would cap their interest rates at 36%. It feels to me that perhaps the writing is on the wall. Ten years from now, will people even remember what a payday loan was?
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