<prompt> Human: After watching John Olivers Last Week tonight piece on pay day loans, and the problems they cause I wanted to ask how accurate this piece is, and whether its a problem in other countries besides the US. The piece paints the pay day loan industry as new age loan sharks, and that you should never take one out due to their predatory practices. Im just curious what rpersonalfinance thinks of this industry.Heres the piece for reference:  <response>: Ive taken some of these out in the past, both the storefront variety and through less-reputable tribal lenders. The storefront lender did abide by the rules that were set by the state I reside in. It was expensive, but when you are in the depths of drug addiction, you do some dumb things. borrowed 350 and paid back 385 a week laterThe tribalinternet lenders were HELL to deal with. I borrowed 500 from one of them. It seemed as though I would payback 650 at the end of the term. Due date came and they automatically deducted 150 from my checking account. They did this for several weeks and I assumed it was my loan being repaid in payments. After 5 of these charges I called the outfit up to figure out why I was being charged more. Turns out, these payments were for interest only and I STILL owed them 650! At that point I had already paid them 750 and they still wanted 650 more!!! If you follow their payment schedule this 500 loan will cost about 2,300. I received notices from tribal courts funny, Im not a tribal member for they have no jurisdiction over me, my employer received wage garnishment papers from a tribal court that were made to appear as legitimate legal documents from a proper court. I finally contacted to Attorney Generals office in my state to ask them how to proceed. Some strongly worded letters and calls brought this nightmare to close more than a year after I took that damn loan out. The man who runsran a lot of these companies was sued by the FTC in 2012 and are the subject of another new lawsuit. This man, Scott Tucker, fancies himself as a race car driver. Wonder how he can afford such a hobby... As Oliver states, literally ANYTHING is better than taking out tribal loans over the internet!!!1 