Here’s another way the payday loan industry preys on unsuspecting customers.
It sells their email addresses to unscrupulous scams trying to make a buck off of their financial woes.
We found this out through Heather, an attorney from Philadelphia.
It seems that Harold, a man Heather doesn’t know but who has a similar last name, applied for a payday loan.
But instead of putting his email address on the form, he put Heather’s. (Honest mistake? Deliberate deception? She doesn’t know.)
Not only did she receive a copy of his loan documents, but she’s being inundated with up to 20 emails per day offering to help the cash-strapped Harold.
A surprising number claim they want to loan him even more money.
“Are you a little stressed with bills piling up? Get up to 1500 as soon as tomorrow,” those emails say, often in tell-tale fractured English of foreign crooks. “Once you complete the form and you can get the money you need overnight.”
Yeah, right.
They just want Harold to provide the critical personal financial information, such as bank account and Social Security numbers, to steal his identity and make his life a little more miserable.
If he was desperate to go to a payday loan store, they figure he might be desperate enough to fall for their scheme.
Heather’s also getting emails about only slightly less work at home programs, satellite cable deals with headlines of “Don’t pay…your next Cable bill without reading this!” and offers for credit cards “built especially for people with bad credit!”
“I never got this kind of spam pre-Harold!” Heather says.
We bet.
These people are truly shameless.
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