State regulators want to suspend Anaheim-based CashCall Inc.'s business licenses for allegedly violating California lending laws via deceptive advertising.
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“CashCall's predatory marketing and personal lending practices will not be tolerated in California,” Jan Lynn Owen, commissioner of state Department of Business Oversight, announced Friday.
The agency accuses CashCall of having advertised loans “up to $2,600,” but when potential customers called they were told no loans of less than $2,600 were offered. Those who did take out loans were charged interest rates of 135 percent or more, Business Oversight also alleges.
The online lender is facing similar complaints in other states–and has found itself in hot water in California in the past. The online lender has been in hot water with California in the past. After then-Attorney General Jerry Brown accused CashCall of making “excessive and verbally abusive” phone calls to consumers in 2009, the company was slapped with a court order to pay a $1 million fine and halt its “loan shark” debt-collection tactics.
Company officials have had no public response to the state's current push for a one-year suspension.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.