Some of these failings included charging excessive fees for sending letters, finding customers who had moved addresses and for late payments. They also charged customers a fifty-pound fee for transferring them to their sister company, debt collector, Carter Forbes, even though there was no cost to the business for transfers.

The company failed to send out required annual statements to all customers that were still paying off their loans after twelve months. After failing to do this, they should not have added fees and interest to these accounts, but they continued to do so.

The company encouraged existing customers to take out loans with their other brands, txtmecash.co.uk and paydayiseveryday.co.uk, without telling them that they were all part of the same company. They then used the provided bank details to take payments from these customers for Cash Genie without consent.

Before the FCA got involved, Cash Genie had already written off £10.3m of interest and fees, and they agreed with the FCA to provide a further 10 million pounds in recompense.

At the start of liquidation, they were still solvent and had the money to pay off all creditors to date, but, on 2nd November 2018, the liquidators wrote to all their creditors, saying that the company was no longer solvent, following an increase in claims. Any further claims after that were expected to get only part of any money they were due.

Cash Genie, and its other forms, no longer exist, and no further claims are being paid out as there is no further money to distribute.

The company also suffered a serious data breach in April 2017, where the personal details of up to 270,000 UK customers were stolen, including bank details, addresses and card details. Such a breach would not have inspired confidence in the company.

In August 2018, the company’s shareholders added £10 million to keep the business afloat, but with so many claims for compensation, this didn’t make enough of a difference to prevent administration at the end of the month.

The deadline for sending in any claims was 30th September 2019. Administration was completed in August 2020, and the company was dissolved in December 2020.

The business made a request to the FCA In January 2019 for a scheme of arrangement that would have capped the refunds for unaffordable lending at £18 million. They then concluded that they weren’t going to be successful with the scheme of arrangement, stopped any further lending a week before the administration date, and chose to go ahead with administration instead.

The administrators immediately sold around 50,000 accounts, including all accounts for Juo Loans to Shelby Finance and, in May 2019, the loan book was sold to a debt collector named Lantern.

On 20th May 2020, the administrators announced that all unsecured creditors would get 5.68p in the pound. Payments were then made over the next few months.

Trusted Quid contacted customers to inform them of the breach and promised to repay any victims of identity fraud, though only under certain circumstances.

Not long after the data breach, the company went into liquidation. The company was closed down, and they are no longer authorised by the FCA.

Payday Express and Payday UK stopped offering loans in October 2017, and The Money Shop began closing shops in 2018 and also offering loans in August 2018. In the last six months of 2018, Instant Cash Loans received 45,000 complaints, and the scheme of arrangement was set up in October 2019 because the company couldn’t afford the costs of dealing with the complaints.

Overall, the company received 182,566 claims, and around 85% were upheld. Compensation should have added up to around £340 million but, while it was hoped that customers would receive 80p in the pound, the final amount agreed was 4.31p in the pound.

The company began making payments on 24th May 2021, and it’s too late to submit a claim.

Enova, the US parent company of CashEuroNet, tried to persuade the FCA to allow a scheme of arrangement, but the FCA disagreed, so Enova decided to close the company and blamed the UK regulatory environment.

As the company is in administration, any complaints about unaffordable lending via the Financial Ombudsmen will be dealt with by the administrators, leaving claimants as unsecured creditors who will likely receive only part of what they have claimed.

As of 14th February 2021, no further claims are allowed.

As the company is in administration, it is no longer offering loans.

The deadline for affordability claims for customers expired on 31 January 2021.

According to Harrisons’ website, “It had originally been hoped that any potential dividend to customers and creditors would have been available by the end of June 2021. This now appears increasingly unlikely….” Harrisons lists several reasons for the delay, including awaiting legal advice, manual claims that are still to be finalised and finalising realisations from sales.

After an investigation, the suspension on trading was lifted in September, but the financiers behind the company declined to invest any more money in the business.

On December 5th of the same year, the company went into administration. While customers are still able to make claims against the company, most consumers will be unsecured claimants who are unlikely to receive the full amount of their claim.

On December 19th 2019, the FCA put MMP into administration. A full timeline of events can be seen to date on the Companies House website, including the information that on 15th June 2020, the company went from administration into creditors voluntary liquidation.

The administrator’s statement talked about “the company’s financial position and potential future redress claims”. The company was, according to the administrators, attempting to bring in new finance to keep the company trading, but the attempt was unsuccessful.

On the Peachy website, the administrators also state, “we will investigate the reasons for the Company’s failure and any creditor is welcome to provide us with information”.

On 6th July 2021, the administrators gave notice of intended dividend where they proposed to make a payment to unsecured creditors. They also set a deadline for any claims of 29th July 2021, so it is no longer possible to make a claim.

The administration was intended to last for twelve months, but one of the company’s secured creditors has agreed to an extension until 4th March 2022.

The FCA asked the company to look at the situation and to raise more capital to support the business. However, the business was unable to raise the funds to continue.

The FCA became concerned that the company “was failing to meet the adequate resources Threshold Condition. Given the severity of these concerns, the FCA has required Uncle Buck to stop lending to customers.”.

Following this, the company chose to go into administration in March 2020.

Harrisons, the administrators, is providing updates on the situation on their site. They have now set three categories for customers claiming from the company:

The first category is for anyone who made payments to the company after 27th March 2020. It is possible that these customers are entitled to claim and may get a reduction of their low or full or partial refunds of any payments they made after that date.

The second category covers customers who had, or have, a loan with Uncle Buck but haven’t made any payments after 27th March 2020. These customers will automatically have their accounts looked at for a possible loan reduction, though if they make a claim for redress, they will not receive a payout due to lack of funds.

The third category relates to anyone who had a loan with the company and paid it off before 27th March 2020. Unfortunately, these customers will not receive any payment as there aren’t enough funds to cover it.

Creditors have agreed that administration will be extended until 26th March 2022. The extension notice, along with further timeline information can be found on Companies House.

Sunny gave a quote to The Telegraph on 27th June 2020, stating that, “Unfortunately, due to the ongoing economic uncertainty as a result of coronavirus and the continued regulatory pressure on the business, we have had to take the difficult decision to give notice to appoint administrators”.

According to the BBC, the administrators looked at how many of the company’s 700,000 customers had been mis-sold loans and came to the conclusion that half a million of that number could make a claim. Given such a volume of potential complaints, the company couldn’t have survived making full payouts to all of them.

As with other administrations and liquidations in the sector, these claimants would all be unsecured creditors. It was thought at first that none of these creditors would receive a payout, but on 28th May this year, the administrators announced that claimants would get 3.21p in the pound as just over 40,000 people actually made a claim.

Every one of the 500,000 potential claimants should have automatically had their credit records cleared.

The FAQ stated: “The Directors of MYJAR have made the decision to place the business into administration due to external factors that have placed financial pressure on the business and its ability to trade through these challenges. Mindful of ensuring the business satisfies certain threshold conditions and the difficulties associated with raising additional funding in this economic environment, the directors of MYJAR have placed the Company into Administration.”

‘External factors’ doesn’t provide a lot of detail, but it is likely that the new regulations from the FCA and the increase in complaints about affordable lending led to MyJar’s collapse, like many other payday loan companies.

The FOS received 849 complaints about the company in just 6 months of 2020 and upheld 55% of that number, siding with the customer on over half of the cases. The costs involved to MyJar, if that level of upheld claims had continued, would not have been sustainable.

The administrator’s website has the latest information on MyJar’s administration, and Companies House shows all filings, including the latest administration progress report submitted on 5th August 2021.

The executive summary of the latest progress report states that “agreement was also reached with Treasury to set aside the sum of £600,000 an equivalent amount to the Prescribed Part to be utilised towards the costs of agreeing Redress customer claims and payment of a distribution to customers identified as qualifying as Redress Creditors.”

While that might sound like good news for customers, the report then goes on to say that: “Due to the potential volume of customers and redress entitlements, any distribution to customers entitled to redress is likely to be exceptionally small, perhaps in the region of 2p in the pound or even lower.”

Like so many of these payday loan administrations, as unsecured creditors, any claimants are likely to get very little of what they were due.

As with many other payday lenders, the crackdown on these companies by the FCA reduced Provident’s profits and led to a stream of complaints about unaffordable lending.

A disastrous reorganisation in 2017, which saw the company’s share value drop by two-thirds over one day, didn’t help matters.

The FOS’s statistics at the start of 2021 showed that Provident was in the top two of companies with the most complaints in the second half of 2020, with 10,000 cases. With an uphold rate of 75%, full payouts would have become unaffordable for the company.

The final decision to approve Provident’s scheme of arrangement was made on 4th August 2021. The scheme will lead to a part payout for unsecured creditors but, had the company gone under, they would have received nothing.

Rather than payday loans, Amigo offered guarantor loans where people with poor credit could borrow as long as the borrower had someone to guarantee that they would pay the loan if the borrower couldn’t afford to make the payments.

Although it wasn’t a payday lender, Amigo was still affected by the new FCA regulations and, as far back as 2016, Amigo was setting aside 9.5% of the company’s revenue to cover the cost of bad loans.

Over time, these costs increased, as did complaints about unaffordable borrowing, and with 90% of guarantor loan affordability complaints being upheld by the FOS, Amigo was paying out large sums to customers.

In January 2021, the FCA became involved due to the increasing number of complaints, and Amigo reached the point where they requested to set up a scheme of arrangement to avoid going under due to the cost of claims.

The scheme of arrangement was turned down by the high court after the FCA objected to its terms and commented that it was unfair to customers, given that customers would get very little, while a bonus payment of £7 million was included for the directors.

Amigo now says it is considering its options, including administration or a possible new scheme of arrangement.