Years ago, I took out a loan through one of these places. I was in dire straits and needed money. The loan came through and I was able to make sure the full payment was in place for them to deduct from my checking account.

Except that it didn't go through. The money was there, but the payment failed. After a couple more attempts, the payment finally went through but they began calling me, hounding me about an additional $140 fee. I refused to pay. This went on for a year and half. Finally, after several conversations with various supervisors, someone actually did some digging around at their end and they discovered they had my social security number listed incorrectly (without the correct number, the bank had refused to allow them to take the payment). It didn't end there, however. The person who discovered the error didn't correct it and they continued to call me. After a few more months, I finally got them to acknowledge the error and to drop their claim.

I should have just contacted the attorney general's office, but I had read that reported cases were taking as long as a year or more for them to even respond to.

Nasty, nasty, vile fuckwads. If I believed in Hell, I'd like to think there is a special place there just for them.

Being an on/off-again student at my age has made a steady cashflow all but non-existant for a couple of years now. Far from having the expected 'disposable income' attributed to my so-called lifestyle, I've had to use check-[kiting] services on a couple of occasions. Although timely repayment is still burdensome, I've never been at the lowest end of the clientele they usually exploit, racking up 'finance charges' well in excess of the principal in a relatively short space of time. But who needs a website? It's not as if the warnings against such lenders aren't millennia old...and if you have a home-based internet connection, then you're obviously not as poor as you could be.