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"Partner with us today to build a better tomorrow" - that's the slogan for Oportun, a predatory lender that sued more poor latinx people during the pandemic than any other.
The company sued longtime customers who'd spent years in a debt-trap of endless payments and refinancing, customers who lost their jobs and missed some of those payments.
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It was just an escalation of business-as-usual for a company that has sued 30 customers a day, every day since May 2016. The company filed 10,000 lawsuits in the first five months of the pandemic. They are among the nation's most litigious lenders.
No wonder. With APRs as high as 66.99%, Oportun has guaranteed that vast numbers of borrowers will fail to meet their payments and end up trapped in the company's lawsuit factory.
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Now they want to go national. The company - which operates in 12 states today - has applied for a nationwide banking charter. But thanks to reporting from Propublica and the Texas Tribune, they may not get it.
40+ consumer rights and latinx groups cosigned a letter to the Office of the Comptroller objecting to Oportun's application. Among the signatories is Unidos US, who partnered with Oportun as recently as 2019.
https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20442556-coalition-letter
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Oportun promises to draw down its campaign of legal terror against victims of its predatory lending, but that's too little, too late. For the sake of the 10,000+ covid-impoverished families they terrorized at the pandemic's height, they should be shut down, not expanded.
Image: Gan Khoon Lay (modified)
https://thenounproject.com/term/debt-collector/977782/
CC BY:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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