Centrepay is an online tool designed to help people on Centrelink pay for essentials like rent or bills through automatic deductions. But financial counsellors say the government service is instead being misused by some providers to exploit vulnerable Australians.
Usury is a crime in most places. This kind of transaction is just usury dressed up in the legal fiction of a rental.
I dunno, seems like a pretty big stretch to call equipment rental usury.
Not at all. A rent to own scheme is essentially legally identical to getting a seller or third party loan except for when title passes over to the consumer. In most other respects, especially in outcome, it’s the same transaction dressed up specifically to avoid existing usury laws.
Even Rent4Keeps’s own website calculates costs by comparing it to an installment loan for sale of goods. Doesn’t get more transparent than that.
Interesting point. Though I have to wonder if making it illegal would just change their sales pitch to permanent rental, instead of rent to own. Ultimately, I feel the solution should lie more in educating consumers on financial literacy.
You can crack down on predatory lending and educate consumers. However, you’ll never be able to educate the average consumer to be immune from sophisticated schemes simply because most people have other things to do on life and scammers devote a lot more time creating new scams than the average person can devote to learning about avoiding scams.
I’m not sure this qualifies as sophisticated - or even a scam, when everything is specified in plain text.
Except obviously it is because nothing on that website alerts the buyer to the possibility of paying 4x the price of the good as the total cost of transaction. 33% to 38% interest pa is already egregious enough as it is but 4x the base cost of the good is absurd and usurus.
Sounds like you just have an ideological bias against consumer regulation and are trying to fit the facts into your framework.
I’m in favor of consumer protection laws on aspects like quality, safety, etc. Things that are more nebulous and harder or impossible to check. But at some point, I do believe consumers have a responsibility as well. I understand that convenience stores charge me more than groceries, and it’s fully on me if I shop there. In the same vein, if I buy a car that’s going for 50% above market value, I’m not about to scream fraud, provided all information on costs and fees were given to me.
You can look at this from another perspective, which is the benefit of allowing a scam like this to continue vs. regulating it out of existence. The only upsides of allowing this to continue is the company perpetuating it making money and a smug lemmitor getting to feel superior to the poors and disabled people, so it’s obvious that it shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
Then please demonstrate how easy it is for the consumer to check their total payments by posting a screenshot from that website that alerts the consumer to the possibility of paying 4x the cost of the device as the total cost of transaction.