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After Nike Leaders Promised Climate Action, Their Corporate Jets Kept Flying — and Polluting
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On dozens of occasions since 2020, a private Gulfstream jet belonging to Nike has touched down at Moffett Field, a federally owned airfield on the banks of San Francisco Bay.
The Silicon Valley site’s most notable feature is a hulking building known as Hangar One, which in the 1930s housed a U.S. Navy airship and today is a conspicuous landmark along U.S. 101.
It also happens to sit about a 30-minute drive from one of Nike CEO John Donahoe’s homes. He became the Oregon-based company’s top executive in January 2020, bought a condo in Portland and registered as an Oregon voter. But he also maintained a home in the Bay Area community of Portola Valley. His previous job was leading a tech company in Santa Clara, and his wife worked at Stanford University until September.
Nike’s jets landed at Moffett more than 100 times in the first three and a half years of Donahoe’s tenure, flight-tracking records show. Landings at Moffett stopped in July 2023 but became more frequent at a nearby airport with a similar drive time to Portola Valley.
Donahoe and Nike executive chairperson Mark Parker have made clear that climate change is a crisis demanding urgent action. “It’s about leading with actions, not words,” Parker said in Nike’s 2019 corporate responsibility report. “We are more committed than ever to help save the planet,” Donahoe said in a 2022 company video.
Yet Nike has failed to shrink one aspect of its carbon footprint that the two men directly influence: travel on the private jets, which emit far more carbon per passenger than commercial airliners.
One of Nike’s private jets takes off from the airport where the company has a hangar in Hillsboro, Oregon, in July. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian)Nike’s jet travel is up. Company disclosures show that its private planes last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The flights are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s commitment to sharply reduce emissions.
The company owns two Gulfstream G650ERs. Flight-tracking records show that their destinations include New York City, where the company has a corporate office, and Paris during the Olympics and in April, when Nike unveiled its Olympic uniforms.
In July, a Nike jet flew down to San Jose, California, and back to its base in Hillsboro, Oregon; it then took off two days later for Idaho, where Donahoe and his wife were photographed at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, an annual gathering dubbed “summer camp for billionaires.”
Vacation spots Nike jets have traveled to include Cape Cod, where Parker owns a home. Since 2020, the planes have landed there at least 15 times. They’ve touched down in the Cayman Islands at least six times since 2021.
But the Bay Area has been a magnet. It was an out-of-the-way pit stop for an Oregon-bound flight after Donahoe delivered the spring commencement keynote at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 2023. It has been a weekend destination with Friday landings and Sunday returns to Oregon. (The jets averaged about 10 flights a year to Moffett Field in the two years before Donahoe’s hiring, when he was a Nike board member and lived in California, versus an average of about 30 a year from 2020 through mid-2023, while he was Nike’s CEO.)
More than 30 times, one of the company’s private jets flew down to Moffett and back to Oregon in the same day, sometimes spending as little as 25 minutes on the ground.
If those flights ferried a single person in one direction, turning what would be one commercial flight into two by private jet, it would release 160 times as much carbon per passenger as if the person flew commercial, said Phillip Ansell, director of the Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He called this arrangement “completely inexcusable.”
“In the current climate where aviation does not yet have a viable route to fully decarbonize, we need to see these types of flights come to a halt,” Ansell said.
Nike did not make Donahoe and Parker available for interviews and declined to say why the jets frequented Moffett Field and, more recently, San Jose Mineta International Airport.
The company said in a statement that its jet passengers comprise a variety of people who are essential to its business objectives, including executives, employees, athletes, entertainers and others. The jets improve productivity and address security concerns for executives, Nike said, calling private flights a standard practice among large global companies.
As for curbing carbon pollution, the company said that “we focus on Nike’s areas of greatest impact,” noting that the bulk of its emissions come from the production of materials for its sneakers and apparel.
Nike CEO John Donahoe in front of a Nike jet. In an Instagram post by the University of North Carolina’s head women’s basketball coach, Courtney Banghart, she thanks him for a “lift.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)Celebrities including Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner have drawn scrutiny for their profligate jet-setting in the face of the planet’s record-breaking temperatures. And in the business world, CEOs are increasingly being allowed to use corporate jets for personal use, according to Equilar, a data firm that studies executive compensation. In 2018, 36% of S&P 500 companies included the perk in CEO pay packages. By last year, that had grown to 45%.
But Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel company, stands apart: It has staked a claim as a corporate leader on the environment, joining thousands of companies pledging to voluntarily slash carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Nike also stands out for disclosing more about its private jet travel than its peers. A review by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive of the disclosures of 30 companies, including 18 of Nike’s self-identified peers, found no others that publicly report emissions from corporate jets. Roughly half report emissions from business travel, which can include jet use.
Get in TouchProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at 503-221-4386, and on Signal at 971-319-3830.
In addition to reporting rising emissions from its jets, Nike’s disclosures show that it is behind on its ambitions for reducing its overall contribution to climate change. The company said in 2016 that it would halve its total emissions; instead they have grown slightly since 2015.
Meanwhile, since December, Nike has laid off 20% of its dedicated sustainability staff, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica have reported, and lost another 10% through internal transfers or voluntary departures.
Nike’s growing private jet use sets the wrong tone from the top, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
“It’s, ‘Do what I say, not as I do,’” Elson said. “Flying private aircraft all over the place certainly isn’t a bold action in support of climate responsibility. That’s the problem. Your actions and your words seem to diverge in unflattering ways. It is not a good look.”
Private jet use represents less than a tenth of a percent of all Nike’s emissions. The overwhelming majority come from production and shipping by the company’s overseas suppliers. But the jets generate 6% of the carbon coming from assets that Nike owns, a share that has grown as Nike has powered its buildings around the world with renewable energy.
Donahoe, whose $29.2 million compensation last year made him one of America’s highest-paid executives, has an arrangement with Nike that allows him to use the jets for more than business. He can fly in them for personal travel at his own expense. He has reimbursed Nike more than $700,000 for such trips in the last two years, securities filings show.
In addition, the company has given the chief executive $293,000 in free personal travel since 2020 as part of his compensation. Parker, the executive chairperson, has received $494,000 in free personal use of the jets in that time.
The jets’ flight paths can be found on the website of ADS-B Exchange, which crowdsources location readings from airplane transponders. The flight records don’t show who is on board, but in some cases flights coincided with news coverage and social media posts indicating their purpose.
Nike’s jets have landed at golf destinations around the country. They visited Augusta, Georgia, ahead of the Masters Tournament in 2022 and again in 2023. A Nike jet has joined the roughly 1,500 other private jets that crowd the small airport during the tournament, making it so busy that Golf Digest has described it as a “bonafide Heathrow.”
In 2022, Donahoe golfed in a morning pro-am event before the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club, outside Columbus, Ohio. Social media photos show Donahoe playing with Rory McIlroy, a golf star Nike sponsors.
One of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the golf event; it returned to Oregon after the pro-am ended, flight records show.
Photographs posted to Instagram from a Nike fan account show Donahoe golfing at an event outside Columbus, Ohio. At right in the second image is Rory McIlroy, a Nike-sponsored golf star. Flight records show one of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the event and returned to Oregon after it ended. (Screenshot by ProPublica)Traveling by private jet is far more polluting than flying commercial.
Ansell, the sustainable aviation expert, said a fully loaded Gulfstream G650ER flight releases about 4.5 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as a Boeing 737, the workhorse commercial airplane. If the Gulfstream is carrying only a single passenger, it’s about 80 times as polluting, he said, because the private aircraft’s weight and fuel consumption stay roughly the same.
Nike’s Gulfstream models can be configured to carry as many as 19 passengers. It’s unknown how many people typically travel on them.
“It is patently irresponsible to be using luxury G650s for flights that carry only a few passengers,” Ansell said.
The pollution from Nike’s jets adds up. Last year, they generated roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as a passenger car driving 10.9 million miles, company disclosures and an Environmental Protection Agency emissions calculator show. (Imagine driving a car around the equator 438 times.) It was roughly equal to the amount of carbon pollution that would be released by burning 4.7 million pounds of coal.
While Nike’s corporate jets have been generating more carbon, the company last year recorded a 65% decline compared to 2015 in emissions from another source: commercial air travel by rank-and-file employees.
Four former employees said the company has restricted worker travel in recent years. They said their managers didn’t cite the need to reduce emissions but instead the need to save money. Nike, in a statement, said its employees also had embraced remote meeting tools since the pandemic, allowing them to “operate effectively without extensive travel.”
By contrast, the company’s jets are used for transportation to “specific high-level meetings and events that require executive presence,” Nike said, “and cannot be conducted remotely.”
Ryanne Mena and Jeff Frankl of ProPublica contributed research.
Let Them Eat Invoices
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Revolving Door
Stopping Excessive Market Power Before It Grows Into Monopoly
The Week in Weird
A Wisconsin Tribe Built a Lending Empire Charging 600% Annual Rates to Borrowers
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In bankruptcy filings and consumer complaints, thousands of people across the country make pleas for relief from high-interest loans with punishing annual rates that often exceed 600%.
Although they borrowed small sums online from a slew of businesses with catchy names — such as Loan at Last or Sky Trail Cash — their loans stemmed from the same massive operation owned by a small Native American tribe in a remote part of Wisconsin.
Over the past decade, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has grown to become a prominent player in the tribal lending industry, generating far-reaching impact and leaving a legacy of economic despair. A ProPublica analysis found companies owned by the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide.
That’s the highest frequency associated with any of the tribes doing business in this sector of the payday loan industry. And it translates to an estimated 4,800 bankruptcy cases, on average, per year.
ProPublica also found that LDF’s various companies have racked up more than 2,200 consumer complaints that were routed to the Federal Trade Commission since 2019 — more than any other tribe in recent years.
“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING,” one Californian with an LDF loan complained in all caps in June 2023 to federal regulators. The person, whose name is redacted, argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”
In a separate complaint, a Massachusetts customer wrote, “I thought this kind of predatory lending was against the law.”
Such confusion is understandable. Loans like these are illegal under most state statutes. But tribal-related businesses, including LDF, claim that their sovereign rights exempt them from state usury laws and licensing requirements aimed at protecting consumers. And so these businesses operate widely, facing little pushback from regulators and relying on the small print in their loan agreements.
As LDF climbed in the industry, it kept a low profile, garnering little publicity. For years it operated from a call center above a smoke shop in the community’s small downtown, before moving to a sprawling vocational training building, built in part with federal money, off a less visible, two-lane road.
But staying under the radar just got harder. Court filings show that LDF tribal leaders and some of their nontribal business partners have come to an agreement with consumers in a 2020 federal class-action lawsuit filed in Virginia. Nearly 1 million borrowers could finally get relief.
The deal calls for the cancellation of $1.4 billion in outstanding loans. Tribal officials and their associates would also pay $37.4 million to consumers and the lawyers who brought the suit. Although they settled, LDF leaders have denied wrongdoing in the case, and its president told ProPublica it adheres to high industry standards in its lending operations.
A final resolution of the case will take months. If approved, the total settlement would be the largest ever secured against participants in the tribal lending industry, lawyers told the court.
“This is a big one,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a Philadelphia attorney who has faced off in court against other tribal lenders and followed this suit closely. “Is it going to stop tribal lending? Probably not because it’s just a fraction of what’s out there.”
The LDF tribe is central to the suit but is not named. Nor is LDF Holdings, the corporate umbrella over the various lending subsidiaries.
A sign along the road at the entrance to the Lac du Flambeau reservation (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)Knowing that both those entities likely would have been entitled to sovereign immunity, lawyers for the borrowers chose a different approach. Instead, they brought the case against members of the tribe’s governing council; high-level employees of LDF’s lending operations; and a nontribal business partner, Skytrail Servicing Group, and its owner, William Cheney Pruett.
Pruett also denied wrongdoing in the case. He did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.
The proposed settlement notes that the tribal leaders and their partners understood that continuing to defend the case “would require them to expend significant time and money.” LDF, under the settlement, can continue its loan operations.
In emails to ProPublica, LDF President John Johnson Sr. defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and beneficial to both borrowers and the tribal members. He said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services,” such as those with bad credit histories and people facing financial crises. Many borrowers, he said, have had positive experiences.
He also emphasized the economic benefits to the tribe, including jobs and revenue for vital services. “Please make no mistake: the programs and infrastructure developed through LDF Holdings’ revenue contributions have saved lives in our community and are helping preserve our culture and way of life,” he wrote in an email.
Johnson, who is a named defendant in the suit, and other tribal leaders declined requests to be interviewed.
John Johnson Sr., tribal president of Lac du Flambeau, helps set up a tribal flag during a youth spearfishing event earlier this year. (AP Photo/John Locher) Partnerships Fuel LendingHistorically, some financial services firms formed alliances with tribes, gaining an advantage from the tribes’ sovereign immunity. For years, consumer lawyers and even federal prosecutors have raised questions about whether some tribal lending operations were just fronts for outsiders that received most of the profits and conducted all the key operations — from running call centers to underwriting and collecting.
The LDF tribe is one of only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes that have turned to the lending business as an economic lifeline. Typically those tribes are in isolated areas far from large population centers needed to support major industries or hugely profitable casinos. Online lending, or e-commerce, opened opportunities.
“If you look at the tribes who do it, they tend to be rural and they tend to be poor,” said Lance Morgan, CEO of a tribal economic development corporation owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “Because they don’t really have any other options to pursue from an economic development standpoint. They just don’t. That’s why this appeals to some tribes.”
He said his tribe considered getting into the lending industry but decided against it.
Tribes in the U.S. still suffer from the legacy of racism and betrayal that saw the U.S. government steal land from Native Americans and destroy cultures. Now, with limited economic resources and taxing options, tribal governments draw upon federal grants and subsidies to help fund essential community services — support promised in long-ago treaties, laws and policies in exchange for land. But these programs have proven to be “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
On the LDF reservation, which is home to about 3,600 people, the median household income is under $52,000, and 20% of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. On lands that are chock-full of lakes, streams and wetlands, the LDF people operate a fish hatchery, hunt deer and cultivate wild rice. The tribe also has a casino, hotel and convention center.
LDF says its lending revenue helps fund essential tribal services, including preserving the natural environment. (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)LDF entered the loan business in 2012 and has set up at least two dozen lending companies and websites on its way to massive expansion, a ProPublica examination found. LDF owns the companies and works with outside firms to operate its businesses, which offer short-term installment loans.
Unlike traditional payday loans, these are not due by the next pay period but have longer terms. Borrowers show proof of income and typically authorize the company to make automatic withdrawals from their bank accounts.
Get in TouchTo do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending, or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.
Details of the tribe’s business operations are not public. A July 2014 tribal newsletter reported that LDF had three lending companies employing four tribal members. By 2022, an LDF attorney told the Virginia judge that LDF Holdings, the lending parent company, employed about 50 people on the reservation. Johnson told ProPublica it currently employs 170 people “who live on or near the reservation,” of which 70% are tribally enrolled.
Each year, on reservation land, LDF now hosts the Tribal Lending Summit, a gathering of staff, vendors and prospective partners. Attendee lists posted online show dozens of representatives of software companies, call centers, marketing firms, customer acquisition businesses and debt collection agencies.
After this year’s event, in June, the LDF business hosts posted a congratulation message on social media: ”Here’s to another year of growth, learning, and collaboration! We look forward to continuing this journey together and seeing you all at next year’s summit."
Business Practices Under FireLike many operators in this corner of the lending industry, LDF has been forced to defend its business practices in court. It has been subject to at least 40 civil suits filed by consumers since 2019, ProPublica found.
The suits typically allege violations of state usury laws and federal racketeering or fair credit reporting statutes. Johnson, in his statements to ProPublica, said LDF follows tribal and federal regulations, and he cited LDF’s sovereign status as the primary reason state laws on lending don’t apply to its business practices.
“Expecting a Tribe to opine on and/or submit to State regulatory oversight is akin to expecting Canada to submit to or speak on the laws of France,” he wrote.
Most suits against LDF’s lending companies settle quickly with the terms kept confidential. Consumers can be at a disadvantage because of the arbitration agreements in the fine print of their loan contracts, which attempt to restrict their ability to sue.
Karen Brostek, a registered nurse in Florida, borrowed $550 in 2017 from LDF’s Loan at Last at an annual percentage rate of 682%. The contract required her to pay back $2,783 over nine months.
Karen Brostek Received a Loan from LDF with a 682% Annual Percentage RateThe agreement with LDF required her to pay $2,233 in finance charges on a $550 loan.
Source: Karen Brostek’s loan agreement (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)It wasn’t her first foray into short-term borrowing. She said her salary did not cover her expenses and she had “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.”
Karen Brostek outside her home in Brooksville, Florida (Bob Croslin for ProPublica)Loan at Last tried numerous times to collect the debt, even threatening in one phone call to have her jailed, she said. Finally, in August 2019, she satisfied the obligation.
Brostek sued LDF Holdings in small claims court in Pasco County in 2021. The suit cited Florida laws that make it a third-degree felony to issue loans with APRs over 45%.
The parties settled within weeks. Brostek recalls receiving about $750. LDF’s Johnson did not comment on Brostek’s case in his response to ProPublica.
She said she does not begrudge the tribe making money but said, “We need to find another way to help them so they don’t feel they’re backed into a corner and this is their only alternative.”
A Groundbreaking SettlementThe Virginia class-action suit claimed that LDF’s governing council delegated the daily operations of the lending businesses “to non-tribal members.” Mirroring allegations in other civil actions, the suit claims that LDF’s partnerships were exploiting sovereign immunity to make loans that otherwise would be illegal.
According to the plaintiffs, LDF Holdings entered into agreements that allow nontribal outsiders to handle and control most aspects of the lending businesses. That includes “marketing, underwriting, risk assessment, compliance, accounting, lead generation, collections, and website management for the businesses,” the suit said. For years, the president of LDF Holdings was a woman who lived in Tampa, Florida. She is a named defendant in the suit, which says she is not a member of the tribe.
Johnson told ProPublica that early on the tribe lacked expertise in the industry and that its partnerships were simply an example of outsourcing, “a standard practice in many American business sectors.”
His statement added, “Recruiting outside talent and capital to Indian country is a mission-critical skill in Tribal economic development.”
The amount of revenue that comes to the tribe is undisclosed, but the class-action suit says the contract with one of its partners, Skytrail Servicing, resulted in only “a nominal flat fee” for LDF.
The 2014 servicing agreement between Skytrail Servicing and LDF is sealed in the court record, and details about the arrangement are largely redacted. In one filing, Skytrail Servicing denies an allegation from the plaintiffs that the tribe received only $3.50 per originated loan.
In a separate filing in the suit, Johnson, the tribal president, said LDF’s lending profits are distributed to the tribe’s general fund, which helps pay for the tribal government, including essential services such as police, education and health care.
The legal strategy crafted by the Virginia consumer protection firm Kelly Guzzo PLC relied heavily on a 2021 federal appeals court decision that concluded that tribal lending was off-reservation conduct to which state law applied. The court found that while a tribe itself cannot be sued for its commercial activities, its members and officers can be.
The class-action suit alleges that tribal officials and their associates conspired to violate state lending laws, collecting millions of dollars in unlawful debts. “In sum, we allege that they are the upper level management of a purely unlawful business that makes illegal loans in Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the country,” lawyer Andrew Guzzo said in a September 2022 hearing, referring to LDF officials.
“What I’m trying to say, in other words, is this isn’t a case that involves a lawful business, such as a real estate brokerage firm, that happens to have a secret side scheme involving a few rogue employees,” he said. “The people that are overseeing this are overseeing a business that makes unlawful loans and nothing else.”
The most consequential aspect of the settlement plan is the debt relief it would offer an estimated 980,000 people who were LDF customers over seven years — from July 24, 2016, through Oct. 1, 2023. Those who had obtained loans during that period and still owed money would not be subject to any further collection efforts, canceling an estimated $1.4 billion in outstanding debt.
Eligibility for cash awards is dependent on the state where borrowers live and how much they paid in interest. Nevada and Utah have no interest rate restrictions, so borrowers there aren’t entitled to any money back.
The tribal officials who are listed as defendants have agreed to pay $2 million of the $37.4 million cash settlement. The remaining amount would come from nontribal partners involved in five of the tribe’s lending subsidiaries.
That includes $6.5 million from Skytrail Servicing Group and Pruett, a Texas businessman who has been involved in the payday loan industry for more than two decades.
The largest portion of the settlement — $20 million — would come from unnamed “non-tribal individuals and entities” involved with LDF’s Loan at Last, the company that gave Brostek her loan.
The consumer attorneys are not done. They noted in a memorandum in the case that other LDF affiliates who did not settle in this instance “will be sued in a new case.”
How We Estimated the Size and Impact of the Tribal Lending IndustryBecause tribal lenders are not licensed by states, there is very little public information about the size of the industry.
Bankruptcies give a rare window into the prevalence of the industry because when people file for bankruptcy, they must list all the creditors they owe money to. Bankruptcies are filed in federal court and are tracked in PACER, the federal courts’ electronic records system. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical to identify every bankruptcy case with a tribal lender.
Instead, we selected a random sample of 10,000 bankruptcy cases using the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). We looked at Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases — the types used by individuals — filed from October 2020 to September 2023. We then scraped the creditor list for each of these cases from PACER and identified which cases involved tribal lenders.
We ultimately identified 119 cases with LDF companies as creditors — 1.19% of our total sample, the most of any tribe. Extrapolating these figures across all 1.2 million Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases during these three years gave an estimated 15,000 cases involving LDF loans during this period (with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2,600). That comes out to an estimated 4,800 cases per year, on average. Many factors can contribute to bankruptcy, and LDF loans were not the only debts these bankruptcy filers faced. Still, these figures showed that LDF stood out among other tribal lenders and had a substantial presence across bankruptcies nationwide.
We also looked at consumer complaint data that we acquired through public records requests to the Federal Trade Commission, which collects complaints made to various sources including the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC itself. We focused our requests on several categories we found to be related to lending products, such as payday loans and finance company lending. Our tallies are likely an undercount: Complaints against tribal lenders may have fallen under other categories, such as debt collection, though our explorations found this to be less common. We found more than 2,200 complaints about LDF companies since 2019, the most of any tribal lending operation.
We compiled hundreds of tribal lending company and website names that we used to search through the creditor and complaint data. However, due to the ever-shifting industry landscape in which websites often go offline while new ones pop up, it is possible that we did not identify every complaint and bankruptcy involving tribal lenders.
Mariam Elba contributed research.
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