Another Native American lender has fallen in the great online lending war. A somewhat obscure tribal lender known as Together Cash has ceased operations. The website for this company is now a simple shell that has advertising on it, and all functionality is gone. The company had been one of the multiple units formed by the Red Rock Lending group, all of which now seem to be gone. All that is left of the company is a number of online complaints, many of which have to do with the way the company deducted the scheduled payments from their customers.
According to the complaint boards it seems the company would (sometimes, often) deduct only the finance charge from the customer's bank account even if the customer had already made a schedule for the company to repay the entire loan.
One complaint from 2009 went as follows, someone we'll call Customer A made the arrangement to pay off his payday loan in full on a certain date and had made sure there were enough funds in his checking account to make it happen. Customer A then wrote the following...
"The following morning I checked my account balance, only to find that they had charged my account the interest on the loan, and not the payoff as specified in the contract."
Then the customer goes on to describe how he called many times to the company, trying to get through. Evidently the phone just kept ringing without end and eventually (after 10 or more minutes) someone would pick-up the phone and then simply hang-up on the customer. This terrible customer service repeated itself several times according to the complaint. Most likely what was happening at this point was that Together Cash was already into their death spiral and had decided not to interact with their customers any longer. Isn't that great service? No wonder the firm couldn't stay in business.
This is a problem on several levels. First, when you have a loan outstanding you need to know exactly how much money is going to be transferred out of your account. Now in this case the amount was lower than what the customer had scheduled but the point remains. The lender and the borrower must be on the same page. A deal is a deal. Second, if it's true that Together Cash kept loans ongoing that were supposed to be paid off, that's a serious violation. This is a form of stealing the customer's money because they will be paying finance charges (read finance charges as profits for the lender) that normally they would not have owed.
The loss of Together Cash isn't much of a loss at all. Unlike a company like Western Sky Financial that recently fell from being the number one Native American lender to a non-functional company, where that company had been the largest lender by scope and scale. Instead, Together Cash was a small lender that just ran the very standard 14 day payday loan operation. No creativity, little reason for any customers to be impressed. If there is anything to say about about the company it's that they appear to be one of the early tribal lending companies. The complaints go back to 2007, 2008, more than a few in 2009. This company was operating well before most of the tribal loan firms that are out there today. Popular firms today like Spotloan and Mobiloans were not even on the map (in any meaningful way or not at all) back in 2007.
So that's the way it goes, the longer you pay attention to Native American lenders you notice the fact that they tend to appear and disappear with some degree of regularity. Together Cash closed before all the heat from the various state regulators started to show-up, which makes one think there was some other problem the company was facing. Either way, that's the end of Together Cash, as they are no longer together and you no longer can get any cash from them.
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