What forces the average distracted web surfer to do a double-take is that the PLA looks so much like the real thing by seeming to take the side of payday lenders, who actually are represented by the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA).
The difference is that the fake site is just a tad more over-the-top. Both sites open up to a picture of someone staring down at a computer, with other photo boxes to the right with joyous people smiling. Whereas the real site offers “Your rights as a payday advance customer” behind one of these boxes, the PLA has a feature it calls “Profit from the working poor. Who are they?”
Both sites offer helpful tips buttons on the left side of the page. The CFSA talks about its minority scholarship program. It likens payday loans to a taxi ride: Good for short distances, but expensive when used for long-term budget needs.
Meanwhile the Predatory Lenders Association offers tools including a “working poor finder,” which places gun shops, liquor stores and pawn shops on the map and shows would-be investors in payday loan stores the best locations to open new locations. It also gives tips on finding for the most profitable races to discriminate against.
“It's easy to find the working poor,” the predatory lenders site says, “but our studies reveal that a difference in location of even a few city blocks can impact profits by as much as 45%.”
The PLA spoof was one of the first websites created by Front Seat, a Seattle-based company that usually makes web tools more earnest than snarky. Its big one these days is walkscore.com where you can enter any address and see how walkable the neighborhood is, on a scale of 1 to 100.
“We’re a for-profit operating like a nonprofit,” says Aleisha Jacobson, the company’s office administrator. “The idea is to use software to make the world a better place.”
Front Seat was founded by Mike Mathieu, a former Microsoft worker who founded allstardirectories.com, which helps would-be students search for schools. Mathieu sold the company in 2006, and now is using the proceeds to support Front Seat, Jacobson says.
“It was more a funny way to draw attention to the problem of predatory lenders,” Jacobson says. “We’re a small company, and we don’t have the resources or the team to do everything we’d like to do.”
The amazing thing is that even in a web environment where, as we are constantly reminded, information more than a few hours old is obsolete, this four-year-old hoax still generates enough hits to land in the top 5 on Google searches.
Nor has the issue of payday lenders receded from the national discussion. Last summer a team of consumer advocate organizations published a widely-circulated report detailing how big banks including Wells Fargo and Bank of America had drastically curtailed the amount of money they lent to consumers, but meanwhile significantly increased the amount they lent to payday lenders, who then used the capital to lend to individuals at an average annual rate of 455%.
“Just as large Wall Street investment houses lurked behind the most predatory subprime lenders in the run-up to the financial collapse,” the report found, “these big banks have strong ties to the most predatory, usurious payday lenders.”
Even today, many readers who click on the PLA’s website still don’t get the joke.
“We get a lot of people who think we’re real. They say ‘How could you possibly do this, this is awful!’” says Jacobson.
The real payday lenders association didn’t respond to a call for comment. But they are aware that the faux Predatory Lending Association exists. Soon after the PLA website went live, the public relations firm that represents Community Financial Services Association sent Front Seat a note saying that the association supported an industry effort to post large posters in payday loan stores, explaining their fees.
The pranksters quickly used the announcement for their own satiric purposes, creating their own large-format poster. It reads, in very small print, “Loan fee per $100 = $17.50. We prefer that you do not think about our loan fees in terms of their 456% APR interest rate.”
Chart courtesy www.predatorylendingassociation.com