It's getting to the point that you don't know if a tribal lender will still be around in the morning when you wake-up. It wasn't that long ago, maybe six or seven weeks, that I was looking at a website for a tribal lender known as Great Basin Finance, sometimes they referred to themselves as GreatBasin Finance. The site looked so dull that I didn't bother at the time writing anything about them because frankly they didn't offer much that was appealing. But when I went back recently (beginning of October 2013) the site was gone.
It wasn't only gone, but there was no record of it ever existing. No archive, no information, no past stories. It seems that I found this Native American lender, and they were brand new, getting ready to launch. Then all of these legal problems coming out of New York started to hit the scene and the tribe behind this company must have pulled the plug on the site. That's the only logical conclusion that I can form, I know the site existed as my notes on the company are pretty concise.
By the way, it's important to note some differences here, we have to be careful when using the term Great Basin Finance. There are a few other companies, with absolutely no relation to this defunct (and now vanished) tribal loan company. Great Basin Financial (not the same as Great Basin Finance) is a financial services company in Utah that has no relation to the tribal payday lender that has gone missing. Also, there is a mining company called Great Basin Gold which obviously is not related at all to Great Basin Finance.
One of the telling notes that I took (and I remember this as I viewed the website of the company) was the fact that they referred to themselves sometimes as "GreatBasin Finance" and not what most people would expect the company to read as "Great Basin Finance" which would be the more appropriate way of writing the company name. Why would the words "great" and "basin" ever be put together to form one word? It just stuck and I made the note of it, so the site was definitely operating at one point in time.
Whether they accepted any loan applications is another matter, if they did it could not have been for very long because all Native American lenders that have been in business for any length of time start to get online complaints. When you search for Great Basin Finance (or GreatBasin Finance) there is simply no information on the net. No complaints, no reviews, no news stories, no archived website, there is just nothing on the internet that would show this site even existed ever.
It's not a big loss to lose this firm, the product they offered (or were about to offer) was the very simple, standard payday loan that so many tribal lenders have been pushing for the last few years. It involved a repayment date of 14 days, which is typical. The payday loans would come with the ability to roll the loan over (yes, I know, what a shock) and just as is so often the case the company made that very plain and clear. The company was going to travel down the same road so many other payday lenders (both the tribal and non-tribal versions) have gone down, which is to offer a payday loan to thousands of people knowing full well that a certain percentage will not be able to repay the loan and instead will take the option of just paying the finance charge and then roll the loan over.
So it's not a loss, there are still dozens of companies offering this "service" or product as they like to call it, to just about anyone with a job who is over 18 years old. You can just pretend that those companies are like GreatBasin Finance; just pretend they don't exist.
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