Ameriloan Closed

What an Ameriloan loan cost

The deception here was mechanical, and the FTC proved it precisely. The loan agreement’s TILA box on a $500 loan disclosed a $150 finance charge and a $650 total — $30 per $100 borrowed. That is expensive but comprehensible.

What actually happened is that the lender automatically withdrew interest only on every payday, applying nothing at all to principal, until at least the fifth payday. Only then did it begin adding $50 per payday toward principal — while still charging the finance charge on top.

A borrower watching $150 leave their account every two weeks reasonably assumed the loan was shrinking. It was not. In the court’s illustration, a contract promising that a $300 loan would cost $390 in fact cost $975.

This is why "check the APR" is not sufficient advice. The APR was disclosed. The repayment mechanics were the fraud, and they lived in the auto-withdrawal schedule rather than in the rate.

Whose name, whose business

AmeriLoan (formerly Cash Advance) and United Cash Loans were run through MNE Services, Inc. under the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. OneClickCash operated through SFS, Inc. under the Santee Sioux Nation. 500FastCash ran through Red Cedar Services under the Modoc Tribe. AMG Services serviced all of them.

The man running the whole thing was Scott Tucker, who was not a member of any of those tribes. The business took in $3.5 billion between 2008 and mid-2013 and employed up to 1,500 people in Overland Park, Kansas.

In March 2014 the court established something that mattered well beyond this case: American Indian tribes are subject to the FTC Act. That holding is why the whole structure came apart.

The criminal case, and the judgment that vanished

Scott Tucker was convicted on 13 October 2017 in the Southern District of New York (1:16-cr-00091, Judge Castel) on all fourteen counts — racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and five TILA counts. On 5 January 2018 he was sentenced to 200 months: sixteen years and eight months. His general counsel, Timothy Muir, got seven years.

The civil side is where the story gets misreported. In October 2016 the FTC won a monetary judgment of $1,301,897,652 against Tucker — the largest litigated judgment in the agency’s history.

Then, on 22 April 2021, the Supreme Court decided AMG Capital Management v. FTC unanimously: Section 13(b) of the FTC Act does not authorise equitable monetary relief. The $1.3 billion judgment was vacated.

So when you read that the FTC clawed back over half a billion dollars for these borrowers — which is true — understand where it came from. The money came from the DOJ criminal case and from settlements entered before the Supreme Court ruled. It did not come from the famous judgment, which no longer exists.

The relief: real, automatic, and now closed

This is the part worth knowing, because it is the exception in this industry. In January 2015 AMG and MNE Services agreed to pay $21 million and waive $285 million in charges assessed but uncollected — covering AmeriLoan and United Cash Loans among others.

In November 2015 Red Cedar and SFS each paid $2.2 million and together waived a further $68 million. Total waived: roughly $353 million.

Then the cash went out. On 27 September 2018 the FTC and DOJ mailed 1,179,803 refund checks totalling more than $505 million. On 19 May 2022 a second distribution sent about 690,000 checks worth over $152 million, bringing the total returned to more than $535 million.

Nobody filed a claim. The FTC used the defendants’ own business records from January 2008 to January 2013 to identify borrowers and simply mailed the money. That is what relief looks like when it works, and it is worth measuring other settlements against.

Both distributions are now closed — the 2018 checks had a 60-day deadline, and the 2022 checks had to be cashed by 17 August 2022. If you are reading this hoping to claim, there is no live route.

The honest thing we can tell you is that the debt itself was waived: nobody should be collecting an AmeriLoan balance from you.