United Cash Loans Fraud, ID theft, banking regulation violation Miami Oklahoma
United Cash Loans is a bit different from most of the other payday loan places out there. These guys will find your bank information somehow--either by buying information from other loan businesses or hacking, I'm not sure which--and will send you a "loan" without your knowledge. Then they'll start taking money out of your account to pay for it, and that includes the interest and fees.
What happened to me was that I had one day spotted a deposit of $300 in my account from UCL. I asked my bank--Academy Bank of Colorado--if this was an error and they replied that it was not. I tried to contact the 800 number on the statement but received no answer over four attempts. I called my bank back and asked if they could return the deposit to wherever it came from and was told "we don't do that."
What to do now? This being the second time someone had fraudulently accessed my Academy Bank account (with their tacit approval, despite proof of illegal activity) I closed my account with Academy and explained why. Academy, ever worthless, replied that as with the prior incident, it must have been my fault for letting them do it so this wasn't their problem. UCL refused to answer their phones. I closed the account and walked away.
Later, I received calls and letters from both Academy Bank and UCL about this matter. UCL never answered but obviously got the messages as they e-mailed me (yeah, they had that, too!) a link to reset my password so I could make payments. Here's the kicker: when I went to their website, I had to type it in manually. In neither my Windows nor my Ubuntu systems, in neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer, was any history or cookie to indicate I'd ever visited their site. That was all the proof I needed that they had gotten my information from some other online loan processor.
Eventually, I got Academy to understand what happened and they were "gracious" enough to zero out the account and write off the $155 in overdraft fees that United Cash Loans incurred.
I reported this to the IC3 department (www.ic3.gov) and I urge anyone with a similar complaint to do likewise. Attached will be a copy of the letter I faxed to them which has all the details you need.
Be warned, though, this business is run by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and as a sovereign Indian nation, your local attorney general is going to have a tough time doing anything, if they're inclined to do anything at all in the first place. Go to the IC3 instead.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Byron
Pueblo,Excuse the second post...
#2Author of original report
Tue, August 27, 2013
...I can only upload pictures, not text documents, and I'm too lazy to go through all the silliness to have a document turned into a .jpg. Here you go.
United Cash Loans
1-800-803-8794
PO Box 1525
Miami, OK 74354
To Whom It May Concern:
I have had two messages on my machine from your representatives wishing to discuss my account or my loan—a different word each time—and a request that I call you back. I am assuming this is in regards to the now-closed bank account from which you are attempting to make fraudulent withdrawals and are imposing higher and higher overdraft fees on the bank.
However, you are engaging in this activity illegally. I never requested a loan from your company. In fact, I haven’t requested a payday loan from anyone for nearly a year now, and that was from a local business, not an online scam factory.
Any money you gave me without my consent is a gift and will be treated as such. No law in the United States or in Colorado allows any party to coerce anyone else into an arrangement by which someone is somehow obligated to pay for services rendered. In other words, I cannot drop a car off at your house then demand you pay me for it, which is what you are attempting to do.
Proof of fraud is further provided by the e-mail I received from your customer service bot. It lists my login name as (My First Initial and Full Last Name)_12. This is not how I enter my name for any accounts, be they e-mail, utility, or banking. You have obviously generated a username of your own design. Even more interesting is that when I look at the cookies on my computer and my browsing history, your site does not appear anywhere until today, when I accessed it to get your fax number.
Whatever your scam is, I am not about to go along with it, and your actions have been reported to the attorney general of Colorado and the state’s consumer protection agency.
What has happened is that you have somehow obtained my personal information from a third party and you are trying to use it to force money out of me. I’m not sure how the Miami Nation does business, but in the United States, that constitutes identity theft and fraud.
Proceed at your own risk.