Lakota Cash Closed

What a Lakota Cash loan cost

Lakota Cash made small loans — the FTC’s order against Webb’s operation covers loans of $300 to $2,525 — and we do not have a verified APR for this specific brand.

The cost that defined it was not the interest. It was what happened when you could not pay.

Webb’s companies filed against borrowers in the Cheyenne River Sioux tribal court and used its orders to garnish wages — reaching people’s paychecks through a forum most of them had never heard of and could not realistically appear in.

The Seventh Circuit ended that in Jackson v. Payday Financial, LLC (764 F.3d 765, 2014), holding that the tribal court had no jurisdiction over non-members and that the arbitration clause was illusory and unconscionable. The clause pointed to a forum that did not exist in any meaningful sense.

That is the most valuable thing to take from this dead brand: a contract clause naming an arbitration forum is not automatically enforceable, and courts will look at whether the forum is real.

Where the $967,740 went

The FTC’s final order against Martin Webb and Payday Financial, entered on 4 April 2014, totalled $967,740: a $550,000 civil penalty for violating the Credit Practices Rule, plus $417,740 in disgorgement.

That money went to the United States Treasury. It was a penalty, not restitution. No borrower received any of it, and there was never a claims site or a redress fund.

This distinction runs through every page in our closed-lenders section, and it is the one readers most often get wrong. A large number in a press release can mean money returned to borrowers, money paid to the government, or a judgment that is never collected at all. Here it was the second.

For Integrity Advance it was the third — $38.4 million ordered, upheld on appeal, and no evidence any borrower saw a cent.

The order’s real value to borrowers was structural: it barred Webb’s operation from suing them to collect.

Not a tribal lender, and that was the whole problem

Martin "Butch" Webb was a Cheyenne River Sioux member who owned these businesses personally. The tribe did not own them. Courts were direct about it: Webb "is not a CRST official or representative of the tribe’s government," and Western Sky was "neither owned nor operated by the Tribe."

Sovereign immunity protects a tribe and its actual businesses. It does not extend to a company because its owner happens to be a tribal member. Without it, Webb’s operation faced state law like any other lender, and lost repeatedly.

The contrast that makes this concrete is Big Picture Loans, where the Lac Vieux Desert Band genuinely owns the lender: the Fourth Circuit held it IS an arm of the tribe and dismissed the case. Same argument, opposite outcome, one variable — real ownership.

Webb’s operation used the tribal connection twice over: to claim exemption from state usury law, and to drag borrowers into a tribal court to garnish their wages. The Seventh Circuit and the FTC took both away.