There's an episode of the Netflix documentary series "Dirty Money" specifically about payday lending. Lots has been written about it too. I believe John Oliver

There's an episode of the Netflix documentary series "Dirty Money" specifically about payday lending. Lots has been written about it too. I believe John Oliver has a bit about it too. This isn't about "freedom" and letting people make their own mistakes. It's basically a disgusting predatory practice designed to deceive and take advantage of the desperate and uninformed. When you look into it, what becomes clear is that people are intentionally deceived into thinking that that after X payments come out of their account the loan is repaid (when those are just "fees"). The agreement language is almost indecipherable. Some states have tried to regulate this, which has typically just meant renaming things to get around legislation (if it ever gets that far). You could probably mostly solve these problems by classifying fees that scale with the size of the loan as "interest". Perhaps people don't understand that if you borrow $100 the fee is $15 (per pay period) while at $300, the fee might be $40-50. It's not fixed. How exactly is this not interest? You see ads on TV for this kind of product. What's funny is one of them is that one says "not available in New York for legal reasons" or somesuch. It's kind of sad that only the state of New York seems to have usury laws to prevent this. What's also interesting is how payday lenders increasingly try and shield themselves from legal action using the sovereign immunity of native tribes (patent trolls also increasingly are trying this). The Netflix documentary has more on this. Payday lenders are big donors to state politicians. In one example, a Texas assemblywoman who criticized the industry quit and was a lobbyist for that industry within weeks of that criticism. I forget her name.