EZ Cash Media is out of business, and it's a relief that the company is gone. In all of the time I have searched for online complaints about Native American lenders, there has been no instance where a company has received so many complaints. The complaints were constant and unabated, and it sounds like the behavior of EZ Cash Media was just flagrantly bad.
EZ Cash Media was a tribal lending company (one of at least four lenders being operated by a conglomerate) and if you gauge their activity versus the date of most of the complaints the company was very active in 2008 and 2009, then declining in 2010. EZ Cash Media offered simple payday loans, and as usual the due date for the loan was the borrowers next payday. And just as always the borrower had the right to extend the payday loan by just paying the finance charge.
Only in the case of EZ Cash Media it sounds like all customers had to have at least one automatic extension of their loan. How is this possible? When you go through the many complaint boards on the internet for this firm there is one very long complaint that is actually provided by an (alleged) ex-employee of EZ Cash Media. The ex-employee goes through a litany of bad behavior, lack of training, lack of education, and an number of other problems that the workers at the company were deficient in. But maybe the most astounding was the revelation (accusation) was that EZ Cash Media employees were not going to process a full repayment of a loan on the first due date, instead they would just authorize a payment from the customer's checking account for the finance charge only. Then this would force the original loan amount (the principal) to roll into the next pay period. And this would transpire whether or not the customer wanted to repay the loan on that due date. Now, it should be noted that this is a complaint from someone claiming to be an ex-employee, there is no way to verify the information. But when you read the complaint it sounds very legitimate, there is a lot of background and the story has a lot of detail. Either way, it makes EZ Cash Media look very bad.
We've always known that payday lenders want their customers to roll their loans over, it has to be that way. The firms make it so easy to do and they remind you of this feature constantly when you talk to them. They remind you in email messages and on their websites, rolling a payday loan over is just a completely ubiquitous part of the payday lending business. And tribal lenders are not any different from their "standard" short-term counterparts, as they encourage (or at least persist in reminding) us that the loan does not need to be repaid fully when the due date arrives. But in defense of Native American lenders this is the first time I have ever heard the accusation made by someone who claimed that they automatically would roll a loan over, even if the customer was trying to pay off the loan. Sometimes there have been situations where there is confusion on the part of the lender and they roll a loan over, and someone complains that they were not supposed to pay for that loan extension. But that is a type of situation that could be classified as the company being sloppy or making a mistake, or a failure on the part of both the lender and borrower to communicate clearly. Just letting customers automatically get a loan extension regardless of what they wanted to do is just wrong and if that is true then EZ Cash Media had no right to be in business in the first place.
Now we are left with one less tribal lender, there seems to be a growing trend of these type of companies going bust. Of course there have always been new companies that pop-up to fill the gap but there is not guarantee they will keep being created. The longer the Native American short-term lenders are in business it seems the worse name they get for themselves. EZ Cash Media just seems like a miniature version of Western Sky Financial. Both of them have gone out of business and both went out with a flurry of complaints posted all over the internet.
At least EZ Cash Media managed to slowly and quietly vanish, and they didn't seem to have that many customers. There's the end of yet one more tribal lending company.
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