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Road To Ruin: Online Lenders Fight Regulation
Payday loan offices have been sprouting up across the country for decades. In these hard times, more people than ever are using payday loans to keep bill collectors at bay. Quick money, at interest rates of around 500% or more, for people with bad credit has been praised by some as a lifeline for the poor, but condemned by others as a trap to keep families in debt. Recently some states have passed laws limiting interest rates, but there is one marketplace that knows no borders — the Internet.
ANP visited a conference where online payday-lending lobbyists urged congress to reject reform, and then traveled to a small town near the Virginia-North Carolina border to learn about the experiences of a man who googled “bad credit loans” and found himself in more trouble than he bargained for.
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