I had to include the following excerpts to get you to go and read the whole article which is quite a very lengthy and devastating expose' of the Super-Rich and their immoral and amoral ways and means of screwing everybody else!!
"" ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make
money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans
"The check arrived out of the blue,
issued in his name for $1,200, a mailing from a consumer finance company.
Stephen Huggins eyed it carefully.
"A loan, it said. Smaller type said
the interest rate would be 33 percent.
Way too high, Huggins thought. He
put it aside.
"A week later, though, his 2005 Chevy
pickup was in the shop, and he didn’t have enough to pay for the repairs. He
needed the truck to get to work, to get the kids to school. So Huggins, a
56-year-old heavy equipment operator in Nashville, fished the check out that day
in April 2017 and cashed it. ....
... ...
"Within a year, the company, Mariner
Finance, sued Huggins for $3,221.27. That included the original $1,200, plus an
additional $800 a company representative later persuaded him to take, plus
hundreds of dollars in processing fees, insurance and other items, plus
interest. It didn’t matter that he’d made a few payments already.
... ...
"Most galling, Huggins couldn’t
afford a lawyer but was obliged by the loan contract to pay for the company’s.
That had added 20 percent — $536.88 — to the size of his bill.
“They really got me,” Huggins
said.
"A growing market
"Mass-mailing checks to strangers
might seem like risky business, but Mariner Finance occupies a fertile niche in
the U.S. economy.
... ...
"The company’s pace of growth is
brisk — the number of Mariner branches has risen eightfold since 2013. A
financial statement obtained by The Post for a portion of the loan portfolio
indicated substantial returns.
... ...
"Huggins said he’s worried about how
disruptive the court case may be. He’s lost a day or two from work. More
ominously, while he had hoped to raise his credit score enough to buy a house, a
legal judgment against him could undo those plans. He and his stepkids are
renting a place from a friend for now.
" “Who sends someone $1,200 in the
mail that they don’t know nothing about except maybe their credit score?” he
said. “It was postdated, good for a month. I guess they give you a month to sit
around and look at it and everything else until you just convince yourself you
really need that money. . . .
" “You think they’re helping you out
— and what they’re doing is they’re sinking you further down,” he said. “They’re
actually digging the hole deeper and pushing you further down.”
Jon Gerberg
contributed to this report.
