Payday Loan Fraud and How To Avoid It
Before choosing a payday loan company online, EVALUATE and QUALIFY each prospective online payday loan company using these 5 criteria - BEFORE you send your personal information over the internet.
Payday loan fraud happens every day to borrowers who rush into acquiring cash without qualifying the online payday loan company FIRST. Identity theft is the motive of of many fraudulent payday loan websites - which results in easy access to your bank account.
We've done the research for you - see Payday Loan Company Evaluation - and provided a good evaluation of some of the more popular Payday loan stores online. We feel there is enough information for you to make an informed descision.
Our theory is there are hundreds of online payday loan companies that MAY be legitimate, but why not evaluate and be 99.999% sure you are dealing with the best in class? We've found that dealing with the best companies cost the same or less than the companies that were ranked lower.
5 Criteria To Use to Eliminate Payday Loan Fraud
This list is pretty complete. FOLLOW IT. You can make a solid decision quickly using these 5 factors to weed out payday loan fraud:
1. BBB Rating
Make sure the company you choose has a "Satisfactory rating" with the BBB. The Better Business Bureau - BBB - is a time tested, reliable and trusted source reavealing whether a business is legitimate or not. Here's how we interpret the BBB data for each website we reviewed:
- SATISFACTORY - In good standing with BBB - limited number of complaints, all resolved.
- UNSATISFACTORY- Many unresolved customer complaints.
- MIXED - This means a website has received good and bad reviews
- MORE DATA NEEDED - Website may be too new to honestly evaluate it.
2. Alexa Rank
Rule of thumb:The lower the Alexa ranking the better.
In the payday loan industry a good Alexa ranking is under 500,000
Alexa records how much traffic every website online receives. If you are #1 in Alexea, you get the most traffic ( Yahoo is #1) .
This is an interpretive criteria because it only ranks quantity of unique visitors. It is many times indicative of a quality website but certainly not the only criteria.
There is a correlation of strong Alexia ranking and site trustworthiness regarding our choices for online payday loan providers.
3. Verisign Security
VERISIGN - Verisign verifies that a website is using secure transaction methods. It is the industry standard for save transactions. Protect your Identity!
**Make sure you are using a payday loan website displaying the verisign logo.**
4. Hacker Safe
HACKERSAFE- A more recent stamp of approval ensuring a website is highly resistant to the latest hacking algorithms.
A Payday Loan website that displays this logo by McAfee can be trusted as a hacker safe site.
The Thawte logo is similar to VeriSign or Hackersafe and indicates strong, up-to-date online security, and will substitute for either VeriSign or Hackersafe.
5. How Old Is The Website?
The longer a site has been online the better. It doesn't mean that newer online payday loan sites are 'automatically' bad. It is however highly unlikely that an older, established website would survive because of the negative attention it would eventually receive. So look for an older date.
We get our date information from archive.org