It’s no secret that everyday we are flooded with ads through all different mediums, from tv and radio to newspapers and now even text messaging. There is a constant battle amongst companies to get their brand out in front of you and most of us have made peace with this and can be passive aggressive about it. But when it comes to the advertisement and marketing of payday loans, especially those on TV and radio, you should take more caution before proceeding in dealing with a company that you don’t know anything about. In recent months, probably due to a ramp up in the holiday shopping season, there have been more and more payday loan ads that have been hitting the airwaves in great numbers and with very wide reach.
When most people see or hear these ads they just dismiss them as yet another payday loan ad but after doing some research into these ads we’ve noticed something very interesting, most of them are leading back to rouge websites that look like they are all being run by the same company even though they have completely different names, designs, and logos. That on its own isn’t too surprising, most payday loan companies have multiple “gateway” sites that they use to funnel traffic to their main site but what set this group of sites apart is that there really wasn’t any funneling of traffic. Instead they were funneling user (thats you) data forward to another server that looks like it’s located in Canada.
When you come across a network of sites like this it’s usually an indication that the entire operation of websites, tv, and radio ads are all nothing more than a lead generation farm that is collecting as much payday applicant data as possible, selling that information to payday lenders as soon as the form is submitted, and then down the road as the data gets older and older they’ll start selling the payday applicant data as “aged payday loan leads” for as little as $0.50 a piece. For lenders this price is very attractive because they get a giant marketing list of people that they know have applied for a payday loan and since it’s been 60 or 90 days after that application, you’re probably ripe for the picking of being marketed for yet another payday loan.
Sure it’s great for the lenders but for the actual people who fill out the payday loan information form it can be a major headache as the data is sold, brokered, and then resold over and over again to anyone who is willing to fork over the money that’s required. As time goes on the data gets cheaper and it gets exposed to more and more buyers, and since they know the data is older they have to use more aggressive marketing tactics in order to get the attention of people who are dead tired of getting flooded with payday loan offers in their email, on the phone, and through their mailbox. Getting off of these sold data lists is almost impossible so before you fill out the application make sure you ask yourself if you can really trust this site? What is their privacy policy? Does that privacy policy clearly state how and when your information will be used? If not, then you’ll probably want to balance the pros and cons of filling out that form and submitting your information.