A thrilling story of how a man threatened with rape over a bogus debt got revenge
You know those terrible phone calls: we hear that you’ve been in an accident; we know you owe money; we are collecting a debt and you need to pay now. But don’t worry. Money is cheap and easy. Why not take out a payday loan? Bloomberg has a cracking story of how when one man was harassed by loan sharks for a debt he never owed he sought revenge. When a debt collector threatened to rape his wife, Rhode Island resident Andrew Therrien made it his mission to expose the scumbags running the fake debt scams.
A few minutes later, Therrien’s phone buzzed. It was the same guy. He gave his name as Charles Cartwright and said Therrien owed $700 on a payday loan. But Therrien knew he didn’t owe anyone anything. Suspecting a scam, he told Cartwright just what he thought of his scare tactics.
Cartwright hung up, then called back, mad. He said he wanted to meet face-to-face to teach Therrien a lesson.“Come on by, asshole,” Therrien says he replied.
“I will,” Cartwright said, “and I hope your wife is at home.”
That’s when he made the rape threat.
Therrien got so angry he couldn’t think clearly. He wasn’t going to just let someone menace and disrespect his wife like that. He had to know who this Cartwright guy was, and his employer, too. Therrien wanted to make them pay.
And so began the quest. And, boy, is it satisfying.
Eventually FTC charges were brought against the scam’s bigshot, one Joel Jerome Tucker. In October, Scott Tucker, Joel’s brother, “was convicted Friday of 14 criminal charges against him in connection to a $2 billion payday lending enterprise that authorities said exploited 4.5 million consumers with predatory interest rates and deceptive loan terms.”
Scott [Tucker], the oldest, was the brains. He’d served time in prison for a scam in which he’d pretended to work for JPMorgan Chase & Co. … Joel, tall and handsome, was a natural salesman. But when he was 21, he was selling furniture and working at a mini-mart, so hard up that he got arrested for bouncing a $12 check. (The case was dismissed.)
In the mid-1990s, Scott opened a payday-loan store and gave his brothers jobs.Lending money to people who don’t have any is surprisingly profitable. In states where such stores are legal, such as Missouri, they’re more common than McDonald’s franchises. … Scott pioneered what he thought was a clever legal loophole that would give him access to that market: He created websites that were owned on paper by an American Indian tribe, which could claim sovereign immunity from regulators. …
The loophole was ridiculously lucrative. Scott’s operation generated $2 billion in revenue from 2003 to 2012. He bought a private jet and spent more than $60 million to start his own professional Ferrari racing team. Around 2005, Joel split to start a company that would allow anyone to get into online payday lending—supplying software to process applications and loans and offering access to a steady stream of customers. All the clients had to bring was money and a willingness to bypass state law. Word spread around Kansas City’s country clubs and private schools that if you wanted to get rich, Joel Tucker was your man.
Posted: 8th, December 2017 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
