The newest tribal lender on the block is American Credit Line and for once I'm actually excited about the new arrival. Unlike the majority of (nearly) all the tribal lenders who fall into the payday lending sphere or the few that fall into the installment loan group, the team at American Credit Line are issuing lines of credit rather than the more traditional loan products.
If you read any of the pieces I have about American Credit Line then you know that I'm glad to have a new lender that is offering something different in the Native American lending industry. Believe me it gets very old writing about the exact same loan products with these tribal loan companies, so it's a mini-celebration to have a newcomer who breaks the mold. Well, they didn't exactly break the mold because Mobiloans was the first (and still the best) when it comes to offering lines of credit.
I looked around for some complaints against this company, and there weren't many to be found but I did find one gem which you can read below...
On 8/23 I submitted a request for a credit line (my loan) to American Credit Line, which by the way is the former Blackcard Loan. I know that payday loans aren't the answer to financial trouble, but I was in a big time bind and waiting for a check from another matter to get to me, it was a reimbursement and it involved something completely separate from American Credit Line.
I received the approval for a $600 line, the company called and checked out all the information, everything was good. I was informed that the funds should be in my account by Friday, 8/24. However, things start to go wrong, as the funds were not in my account on the scheduled date, so I called up the lender and asked what was going on, and they said that the money would be sent at some point during that day and to re-check the acocunt on the 25th, which happened to be a Saturday.
Now it's Saturday and there are still no funds in the checking account. American Credit Line has an online chat box that I decided to use and started talking with them. The person stated that the money was in fact sent to our account, and that I should be contacting my bank to inquire as to where the funds were. The interesting thing was that I had already had enough sense to check with my bank's customer service dept. and the bank said there was nothing that could be done because they couldn't see any inbound transactions.
Now things get to a point where they just go back and forth, because customer service is saying that on 8/25 the funds were already sent to me. Then things start to get weird because when I asked if they could track the funds I was abruptly cut off from the call. I immediately called back but I was placed on hold even before anyone answered the phone and was disconnected for a second time not long after being put on hold.
I gave up for that day and decided to see what American Credit Line did on Monday, which was the next business day. Don't ask me why but I gave ACL the benefit of hope that things would turn out alright but of course that wasn't going to be the case.
Then on Monday August 27th and there is still nothing in the account, no activity. Here it goes again I call American Credit Line and we talked with my bank which in turn verified (again) that there is no money in the account and no recent transactions that are pending.
For some reason this lender believed that I got the money and was just wasting their time or thought that I was trying to get more money out of them or something. So ACL starts this investigation to see what happened to the money and they just left me with no money while they conducted their little investigation. The fact that I was still in a financial emergency, which I will remind everyone that's why I came to this lender in the first place, didn't seem to bother the cats over at American Credit Line.
Then August 28th rolls around, it's Tuesday morning. Of course I phoned the customer service team and was simply disconnected again after being told that things are alright and that the account was in fact funded by them. I was told I wasn't patient enough about this whole situation. When I asked to talk to a supervisor at their office I simply was disconnected again, not surprised.
For some reason on August 29th the company actually admitted that the funds were lost, which is strange. My loan was supposedly going to be transacted a second time so I could get the money. They promised that the money was coming and that I should have by the next business day which would be Thursday. Meanwhile, they keep sending me email messages about how the money will be there the next day and things are being taken care of.
Then Thursday morning rolls around and still no transactions, then it's Thursday afternoon and there is still nothing going on. I called again and was told that the money would be posted, again and again.
Finally it's the end of the month and no money has been deposited. No transactions. Called the bank, called American Credit Line. Nothing going on anywhere. More promises that the funds would be sent but ultimately I get the hang-up treatment again.
The whole thing was just a mess and the story goes on, next I was on the chat feature talking to some agent again about the same thing. Same outcome the money is on the way it is being funded and so on. Just the biggest mess you can imagine.
Alright so that's not a very good review for American Credit Line and I will say it's one of the more well explained complaints that I've found in a long time. Here is what I think happened, even though we didn't get this from the customer nor did American Credit Line hint this to the customer, but maybe even the company didn't understand at the time.
Most likely what was going on right at that point in time was the big push that the New York AG was making against a number of tribal lenders and some state licensed high interest shops as well.
The push was for the big banks to not allow their electronic banking system, specifically the ACH transactions, to be available for use to companies that were designated as Native American lenders who charge high interest. There's a good chance that American Credit Line was on this list or was in some way connected to the big list that New York published for their cease and desist letter. Some banks reacted more immediately and sternly than others, so it's a good chance that this particular customer (would-be customer) just happened to have a bank account at a bank that cracked down hard on these loan transactions.
So while the customer doesn't believe that American Credit Line wasn't doing anything to push this loan through, my guess is that they were in fact trying hard to get the loan to this guy. Tribal lenders don't make money if they don't issue loans, they are ready to push out loans to anyone with a job, that's their whole bread and butter business. So while the customer is thinking that the lender is somehow holding back the funds the truth is probably the opposite.
Perhaps the lender didn't want to be upfront about the reason why they couldn't get the funds through? That's distinctly possible. But either way it was most likely the intervention of the bank (due to the intervention by the state of New York) that created this situation, not the lender trying to mess around or be troublesome to the customer.
This complaint also helps highlight just how unapproachable most Native American lenders function. Most of them are like a black box, where you put some information into the black box and out spits some money, or a notice to go away. But we never see the inner workings or get much in the way of explanations of why things are happening. And that applies in a big way to this complaint because the lender should have been honest about what was actually stopping the funds from getting through.
Rather than have this customer wander away to another lender, and actually solving his short-term financial dilemma, this greedy lender wanted to keep him on the hook as they confusingly tried to sort out a method to transfer him the high priced cash. But they never succeeded and the customer was left out to dry.
Bad customer service was apparent the entire time, including several hang-ups and rude behavior. It goes without saying but this doesn't do much to entice me to want to borrow from American Credit Line, I will personally stick with Mobiloans for any Native American line of credit requests that I have in the future.
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