Texas Is Throwing People In Jail For Failing Woefully To Pay Off Predatory Loans

At the very least six folks have been jailed in Texas in the last couple of years for owing cash on payday advances, in accordance with a damning analysis that is new of court public records.

The financial advocacy team Texas Appleseed unearthed that significantly more than 1,500 debtors have now been struck with criminal fees into the state — despite the fact that Texas enacted a legislation in 2012 clearly prohibiting loan providers from utilizing unlawful fees to gather debts.

It absolutely wasn’t allowed to be because of this. Utilizing unlawful courts as commercial collection agency agencies is against federal legislation, the Texas constitution plus the state’s penal code. To explain their state law, in 2012 the Texas legislature passed legislation that explicitly describes the circumstances under which lenders are forbidden from pursuing unlawful fees against borrowers.

It’s quite simple: In Texas, failure to settle that loan is a civil, maybe maybe not a unlawful, matter. Payday loan providers cannot pursue unlawful costs against borrowers unless fraudulence or any other criminal activity is obviously established.

In 2013, a damaging Texas Observer investigation documented extensive utilization of unlawful costs against borrowers ahead of the clarification to convey legislation had been passed away.

Nevertheless, Texas Appleseed’s new analysis indicates that payday loan providers continue steadily to routinely press questionable unlawful charges against borrowers.

Ms. Jones, a 71-year-old whom asked that her name that is first not posted so that you can protect her privacy, had been those types of 1,576 cases. (The Huffington Post reviewed and confirmed the court records related to her instance.) A payday lender, after losing her job as a receptionist on March 3, 2012, Jones borrowed $250 from an Austin franchise of Cash Plus. More