Richard Moseley Sr. and Scott Tucker thought they had a good thing going. Their plan was simple: charge desperate clients outrageous interest rates and use a Native American tribe as cover. But today in New York, the two Kansas City based racketeers found themselves facing FBI agents, charging them with their involvement in a scheme to defraud and scheme some 4.5 Million Americans out of billions of dollars.
More than 600 Kansas residents worked for Tucker’s enterprise, which reached out to a few millions of Americans and made himself and his partner, Richard Moseley, quite rich. In the indictment, Tucker, a Leawood, Kansas resident is asked to forfeit $2 BILLION dollars worth of collected assets he managed to horde from the results of his plan to steal from the poor. Among the items the fed demanded control of beyond money: six Ferraris, 4 Porsche cars & SUVs, a Lear jet and luxury homes.
Hydra Lenders, the organization to which Tucker ran, was found to be involved in a unique scheme of fraud, which impacted users who were unaware they were ever borrowing money. Consumers would inquire about loan rates, according to the indictment, and often — even if they did not accept the loan, they would receive it anyway, finding that they owed outrageous fees, often over 700%.
In documents submitted to the court and part of the indictment, employees located in Overland Park were instructed to lie, to tell callers they were in Oklahoma or Nebraska in order to give the impression that their “Indian Nation” loans were being originated from a reservation, rather than a sham business in Kansas City. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma surrendered $48 Million dollars to the federal government upon ask on Friday.
Documents surrounding the corporation create a giant shell game, the company showing upwards of $161 Million in profit, but ongoing business efforts to hide or shield funds means it may take a while to find out exactly how large the scheme became.
Tucker, according to documents released today, created numerous shell companies and non-affiliated entities to hide money, resources and connections — sometimes to give borrowers the illusion that loans had been sold or that a different practice was being used to recover the debt, allowing him to increase fees, refinance, or again take a bite out of average consumers.
http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/illegal-700-interest-payday-loans-paid-for-scott-tucke-1758381829
They have each been charged with an array of violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, charges that range in maximum sentences from one to 20 years in prison.
Oh, and the feds have seized Tucker’s race cars, as they tend to do.
The indictment targets Tucker’s lending practices from 1997 to about 2013 at his businesses, which operated in several states and included Ameriloan, One Click Cash, FastCash and other payday loan services. These businesses offered high-interest, high fee loans to people who can supposedly repay them the next time they get paid, but have been criticized and investigated over obscenely (and in some cases, illegally) high interest rates.
By operating multiple pay-day loan entities, Tucker was able to confuse consumers and hide money made, which led to the indictment.
Speaking to Al McSurely and Rev. William Barber II this summer in North Carolina, the issue of predatory lending was viewed as a “most significant problem”, with Al McSurely noting to me: “People, especially minorities, are getting taken advantage of and this is a problem that destroys communities.”
For Scott Tucker today will be remembered as a day in handcuffs. But for hundreds of thousands to millions of Americans who were abused by this predatory scam, the end to their nightmare took far too long.
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