Scott Tucker

PART ONE: THE LENDING OPERATION

Tucker's companies — operating under names including AMG Services, MNE Services and others — made short-term, high-interest loans online to borrowers across the country. The loans carried annual percentage rates that reached into the hundreds and, per government filings, in some cases over a thousand percent. They were marketed to people in financial difficulty, often through misleading disclosures about the total cost of borrowing.

The FTC brought civil action against Tucker's operation for years before the criminal charges. The FTC found that the lending terms were systematically misrepresented to borrowers. Across the operation's life it collected about $3.5 billion from 4.5 million borrowers, per the DOJ; when it charged him in February 2016 the DOJ described a $2 billion enterprise. Neither figure is his profit. The FTC won a $1.27 billion civil judgment in September 2016, which the Supreme Court reversed in April 2021 because the statute did not let the FTC seek money that way. [SOURCE: DOJ S.D.N.Y., 2016–2018; AMG Capital Management v. FTC, 22 April 2021]

PART TWO: THE TRIBAL COVER

The mechanism Tucker used to try to place the loans outside state law was tribal affiliation. He reached agreements with several Native American tribes — the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Modoc Tribe and the Santee Sioux Nation, per the record — to give those tribes nominal ownership of his lending companies. The theory was that loans made by tribally owned entities were governed by tribal law, not state law, and were exempt from state usury limits.

The government's case was that the arrangement was a sham: the tribes had no operational control, received about one per cent of revenues, and were not, in substance, running the lending businesses. The jury agreed. The Miami Nation forfeited $48 million in a 2016 settlement. Per reporting, some tribal members were not fully informed of the nature of the arrangement into which their tribal governments had entered. State that per the record; do not generalize. [SOURCE: DOJ trial record; trial reporting NYT]

PART THREE: VERDICT AND SENTENCE

Tucker and his attorney Tim Muir were tried together in Manhattan in 2017 and convicted on all fourteen counts on 13 October 2017. On 5 January 2018 Judge P. Kevin Castel gave Tucker 16 years and 8 months and Muir 7 years. VERIFIED: Tucker is in federal custody with a projected release around 2032; in March 2022 he received a further 36 months, concurrent, for a false tax return in Kansas and owes the IRS about $40 million. [SOURCE: DOJ S.D.N.Y.; IRS-CI, 2 March 2022]