SANTA FE, N.M. (KRQE) – “This is the worst example where consumers are getting screwed in the history of the state of New Mexico,” Former Attorney General Hector Balderas said. He is talking about one of the most significant financial investigations that’s ever been pursued in the state. And the damage left in the wake of this corporate ‘con’ is staggering: tens of thousands of New Mexico victims duped out of millions of dollars.
“I don’t know how a person does this for a living. (A company) banks millions of dollars personally and feels as though they’re engaged in any even remotely legitimate endeavor,” said private attorney and former Assistant Attorney General Scott Fuqua.
It was called “FastBucks,” a Texas-based small loan company that operated in five states including New Mexico with dozens of outlets across the state. But the FastBucks operation was hardly by the book.
FastBucks was in the high-interest, short-term loan business. Its customers were mostly low-income individuals who typically would borrow a couple hundred bucks at interest rates as high as 650%. For example, a Crownpoint resident went to FastBucks and took out a one-year, $800 loan at 521%. She ended up paying FastBucks $3,384 in interest. Over an 11 year period FastBucks raked in $116,000,000 from 44,000 New Mexico customers.
“The interest rates that were being charged by FastBucks were outrageous,” New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said. “It was basically acting like a loan shark.”
“The idea that you can build a financially successful business that is fundamentally predicated on extracting money from people who don’t have it is mind-blowing,” Scott Fuqua said.
In 2009 New Mexico Attorney General Gary King filed a civil lawsuit against FastBucks accusing it of playing fast and loose with the law. A District Court Judge later ruled FastBucks’ “…engaged in unconscionable lending by taking advantage of the lack of knowledge, ability, experience or capacity of persons to a grossly unfair degree…”
“The evidence showed … and the judge held … that this was a shady company and more importantly, that they owed the state of New Mexico millions of dollars,” Former Attorney General Hector Balderas said.
In what was one of the largest consumer judgments in state history, FastBucks was ordered to pay victims a whopping $32,000,000 in restitution. The judgment was heralded as a victory for New Mexico families over the misconduct of a predatory loan business. But the celebration was short-lived.
Rather than pay the multi-million dollar judgment, FastBucks filed an appeal, declared bankruptcy, and then disappeared. A FastBucks lawyer made it official. In an email to the Attorney General’s office, he wrote: “…the entire FastBucks operation ceased doing business. … There are no assets of the organization to satisfy any portion of the judgment.”
But FastBucks didn’t really vanish. In fact, it was business as usual for the loan company. They weren’t really gone, they were just hiding out, in plain sight.
In an apparent effort to avoid paying the $32,000,000 judgment, FastBucks pulled a fast one. The company simply changed its corporate name to Infinity Loans. Perhaps FastBucks’ corporate officers thought nobody would notice Infinity was actually FastBucks in disguise.
For example, FastBucks had a loan outlet at 1432 Cerrillos in Santa Fe. However, in 2019 somebody fastened a temporary vinyl banner to the building identifying the business as Infinity Loans. In 2018, an Infinity Loans banner covered the FastBucks sign on the company’s Clovis business on North Prince Street. The same ruse could be seen in Carlsbad and Farmington. All over the state, FastBucks had seemingly disappeared and Infinity, magically, took its place.
(Images above show a FastBucks and Infinity Loan sign at a location in Carlsbad. On the left is an image from Google Streets in 2019. On the right is from 2013.)
So how did FastBucks pull it off? Well, they had an accomplice….the State of New Mexico. You see, loan companies are regulated by the state’s Financial Institutions Division. If you want to open a new loan business you must first get a license. So when Infinity applied for a license, state regulators failed to notice Infinity was FastBucks.
Infinity’s license applications were identical to the FastBucks applications. The corporate addresses were the same and so were the corporate officers, store addresses, and phone numbers. And even though state officials say they knew about the FastBucks $32,000,000 judgment, state regulators approved the Infinity license applications anyway, helping FastBucks ‘officially’ disappear and reincarnate as Infinity Loans. “One was called FastBucks, the other was called Infinity Loans. It’s the same company with a different name,” said former Assistant Attorney General Scott Fuqua.
In 2021, the Attorney General filed a new lawsuit alleging FastBucks CEO Charles Horton, Infinity Loans and others had engaged in deception by transferring FastBucks assets to Infinity Loans to circumvent the multi-million dollar court-ordered judgment. That case has now been settled. Charles Horton agreed to pay New Mexico $664,000. The Attorney General will also seek to collect another $5,000,000 from various properties owned by Horton. The New Mexico Infinity Loans outlets settled the lawsuit for $300,000. Infinity Loans has since been sold to another firm that was not involved in the case.
And so, New Mexico’s longest-running consumer protection case comes to an end some 14 years after it began. Today, FastBucks is gone. So is Infinity along with some $32,000,000 belonging to New Mexico victims. Case closed.
“They’ve been allowed to date to get away with $32,000,000 worth of violations of New Mexico law by taking that money from those among us in New Mexico who have the least to give. That can’t be right,” Scott Fuqua said.
“It was much easier to steal from New Mexicans and then pay pricey lawyers to evade the law. … This is what needs to change in terms of how we regulate these payday lending companies,” former Attorney General Hector Balderas said.
“What I’m most heartbroken about is not the impact necessarily on this office, but the impact on those people who were expecting … some kind of justice that, frankly, still hasn’t come as a result of this case,” Attorney General Raul Torrez said.
In 2022, the New Mexico Legislature put an end to ‘predatory lending’ by capping the percentage rate loan companies can charge at 36%.
