-Yeah, that's how they get you.
It's legal robbery is what it is.
They're suing me for $3,221.
27.
-Do you have that? -Yeah.
-No, I mean, do you have the money?
-No.
-In April of last year, Stephen Huggins
gets a check in the mail.
He looks at the envelope, doesn't recognize the name
on the enveloped.
He thinks, "Who is this from?"
It's from a company called Mariner Finance.
It's a company most people haven't heard of,
but they mass-mail checks to people.
Their live checks made out to you,
but if you sign it, you're on the hook,
and it can be for as much of 35% interest to pay that loan.
-I just figured it was a like a predator lender
because who just randomly mails people checks in the mail
for $1,200.
Never seen them, never talked to them,
don't even know if they have a job or not.
Just send them a check.
And I guess that's where they come in later
and take them to court and sue them.
-Mariner versus Stephen Huggins.
Mariner versus John Foster.
Mariner versus Sonia King.
Mariner versus Catherine Burge.
-Plaintiff.
-It was like a straight five minutes with 20,
30 people that they were suing in one day.
Do they do that every day?
You know, if they do, someone needs to look
into their practices
because they are predatory lending.
-Mariner has access to credit reports,
and they find people who have fair credit,
people who may have had problems in the past,
but they're still capable in Mariner's estimation
of paying it back.
Lot of times these are people who don't make a lot of money
and could use some.
-My truck transmission broke down on me.
I couldn't get a loan through the bank
because my credit score wasn't high enough.
But I had this, so out of desperation, I guess,
I cashed that to get my truck fixed.
-Once people cash the check, the costs start rising.
Take Huggins' case, he gets the $1,200 in the mail,
he cashes that.
They call him back in and say,
"Would you like to borrow some more?"
He takes out another $800.
At this time, the interest rate bumps up a few points to 35%.
He misses a few payments.
By the end, he owes, after processing fees
and other charges,
he owes $2,684, and then he's sued.
He looks at the fine print, he realizes that he has agreed
to pay for their attorney fees
if they sue him successfully,
so that adds another $536 to what he's gonna pay.
Consumer installment lending,
which is what this field is called,
is growing very rapidly, and so is Mariner.
Mariner had 57 stores in 2013.
It now has 450 stores in 22 states,
so it's really expanded very quickly.
Where it gets interesting, I think,
for people is that this place, Mariner Finance,
is owned by a private equity firm based in New York,
pretty well-known one called Warburg Pincus.
And Warburg Pincus is led by an even more well-known person,
Tim Geithner.
-Millions of Americans have lost their homes
and millions more live with the risk
that they will be unable to meet their payments
or refinance their mortgages.
-Geithner is the former Treasury Secretary.
He was one of the people in the US
in charge of the bailout of the banks
and led us through the financial crisis,
and it was a crisis that he blamed in part
on predatory lending.
-I want to just emphasize at the beginning that this crisis
is partly the result of failures in consumer protection.
-Through a spokesman, he declined to answer questions.
The company did issue us a statement
and said that the company practices responsible lending.
And their loans are at loans in accordance
with all state and federal laws.
-Ma'am, do you agree that you owe Mariner Finance $3,164?
-We've looked at places in Ohio,
Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland,
you see pretty much the same thing.
You see the live checks, you see the people
being dragged into court
because they haven't paid a lot of them
because they got the live checks
and shouldn't have signed them, probably.
Why did you want to borrow money?
-Because I wanted to get my teeth fixed.
-I talked to about a dozen Mariner employees,
and all but two said
that they had misgivings about what they were doing there.
These were all people who worked front line
in the stores where Mariner does its business.
They all said they had qualms about what they were doing
with people, the high interest rates.
They had qualms about giving people sums of money
that would be very difficult for them to pay back.
Meanwhile, the company's still making money off of people
like Stephen Huggins.
-If allowing them to rob people of their financial stability
or whatever is legal, then do it legally.
You'd think they're helping you out, but what they're doing
is they're sinking you further down,
and, you know, it's like digging a deeper hole
instead of throwing some dirt in the hole
to help you get out of it.
That's kind of how I look at it.