Meet the country’s most innovative/sketchy payday loan lender

According to the Wall Street Journal, Scott Tucker has a really impressive story. Tucker, a late-blooming race star who scored a third-place finish at the Rolex 24 at Daytona endurance race earlier this year, only picked up auto racing about five years ago, and he’s earned such fame that he had a documentary about his life air on the Discovery Channel. But here’s the part this storyline doesn’t tell us — how he got here. Sure, the WSJ’s story calls him a “private investor,” but the Center for Public Integrity notes he earned his significant fortune — enough to start up his own auto-racing team — by running a payday lending company. This company uses partnerships with Native American tribes as a front to get around laws designed to protect consumers — allowing his company to do incredibly sketchy things, such as hiding its address and shielding itself from lawsuits using shell companies. Somehow, this is legal. And Tucker won’t be talking about it himself. “Due to a confidentiality agreement, I am not permitted to discuss the business of my employer,” he said about his businesses. Read the report at the source link — the first part in a series. source

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