Debbie Wasserman-Schultz scarfs up $$$ from industry Google bars from advertising [View all]

[cali]

Yep, you guessed it: Payday lenders.

Imagine that, a multinational with more scruples than our Debs.


Imagine you find yourself in a bit of a financial crisis: Rent is due but your car broke down a few weeks ago, eating up few hundred dollars. Now you’re short. You know your family and friends can’t help, so you type the phrase “can’t make rent” into your browser, to see if the Internet has any wisdom to share. You start seeing ads for companies that say they can help. After quickly typing in your information, a company offers you a $500 loan. Painless! But a few weeks later, you can’t pay it back. You spend more money to push back the due date, and now you’re getting solicited by other lenders too, encouraging you to take out another loan if you’re feeling financially squeezed.

It’s a stressful—but totally plausible—scenario, and one that Google is trying put an end to.

On Wednesday, the search engine announced that it would ban ads for payday lenders (and similar services) starting on July 13. In a statement, David Graff, the company’s director of global product policy wrote:

We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for loans with an APR of 36 percent or higher. When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that.
Graff added that the new policy “is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products,” and will still leave room for companies to advertise mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/google-payday-loan-ads/482340/