Golden Valley Lending Closed

What a Golden Valley Lending loan cost

The CFPB’s complaint put the range at 440% to 950% APR on loans of $300 to $1,200. Plaintiffs in the private litigation pleaded 543% to 919%.

Note the loan sizes. These were not large loans, and that is the point: at 950%, a $300 loan does not need to be large to become unpayable. The people taking them were covering a utility bill or a car repair, and the finance charge exceeded the principal well before the schedule ended.

The legal theory that ultimately mattered was not about the price at all. It was that the loans were void under borrowers’ own state usury and licensing laws — meaning nothing was legally owed from the outset, so every collection attempt was itself improper.

That is a stronger claim than "this is too expensive", and it is what produced cancellation rather than refunds.

The CFPB case that delivered nothing

It is widely believed the CFPB brought Golden Valley down. It did not. The Bureau filed suit on 27 April 2017 in the Northern District of Illinois (1:17-cv-03155), the case transferred to Kansas that September (2:17-cv-02521), and on 22 January 2018 the CFPB voluntarily dismissed it without prejudice under Acting Director Mulvaney. It has never been refiled.

What resumed was the investigation, not the lawsuit: civil investigative demands were re-issued in late 2019, and Director Kraninger denied a petition to set them aside in February 2020. No enforcement action followed.

The CFPB’s theory was a good one — that the loans were void under borrowers’ own state laws, so collecting on them was deceptive regardless of the rate. It never got a ruling.

The private bar did. In Hengle v. Asner (E.D. Va. 3:19-cv-00250), the court held that applying tribal choice-of-law would let lenders "violate Virginia's compelling public policy against the unregulated lending of usurious loans," and the Fourth Circuit affirmed in November 2021 — holding that tribal officials do not get immunity from prospective relief. That is the ruling that produced $450 million of cancelled debt.

What you got, and the one exception that catches people

The Hengle settlement received final approval on 25 October 2022. Its total value was roughly $489 million: over $450 million in cancelled debt for approximately 555,000 borrowers, plus a $39 million cash fund.

Notably, the cash came from the non-tribal financiers — Asner, Landy, Gortenburg and Vittor, operating out of Kansas City — rather than from the tribe.

Relief was automatic. There was no claim form to miss.

The exception matters, because it is the one thing that can still leave you owing money. Cancellation covers Golden Valley, Silver Cloud and Majestic Lake loans taken at any time — but Mountain Summit only for loans taken before 1 February 2021. A Mountain Summit loan from February 2021 onward was not cancelled.

You cannot look this up yourself any more: upperlakesettlement.com is now a blank placeholder page. That is precisely why we state the cut-off here.

It did not shut down — it became Uprova

Golden Valley’s site still loads. It stopped originating, but its homepage carries a modal that pushes new applicants to uprova.com with a tracking tag identifying where they came from. Majestic Lake does the same.

All four brands run the same WordPress theme, literally named "tle" for tribal lending enterprise, and share two IP addresses between them. They were always one operation.

Uprova is the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake’s current flagship, still lending at APRs up to roughly 725%. So the tribe's lending did not end with the settlement; the brands that carried the liability were retired, and the traffic was redirected to a clean one.

That is the pattern across this industry, and it is worth internalising: brands are disposable, operations are not. A settlement that cancels $450 million of debt is a real victory for the people whose debt it cancelled. It is not the end of the business.