NPR’s Planet Money on What Happened to Western Sky

Here.

An excerpt:

On TV this summer, you might have seen this ad with a smiling young woman offering help for all those troublesome bills.

“The problem-solver from Western Sky. Get up to $10,000 without collateral. Enough to pay off your payday advances, once and for all,” she says.

There’s a beating drum in , presumably to drive home a point — Western Sky says it’s 100 percent Native-American owned and therefore exempt from state laws banning high-cost loans.

But Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of financial services for New York State, doesn’t buy that argument. “These are companies looking to prey on people who in my opinion are some of the most vulnerable people in our society,” he says.