Last week, I praised four state attorneys general for suing TP-Link over its ties to Communist China. This week brings another reminder of why sharp, effective attorneys general matter. This time the subject is the bread-and-butter consumer protection work that in other hands has been known to drag on without results.
On Wednesday, a coalition of 17 attorneys general, led by Iowa’s Brenna Bird and Nebraska’s Mike Hilgers, announced a settlement with Snap Finance, a Salt Lake City–based fintech company. The deal is worth nearly $665 million, and almost all of it goes to consumers.
Snap offers lease-to-own deals through retailers. A shopper who wants furniture, a computer, or jewelry and would rather pay over time signs up with Snap at checkout. Snap buys the item and leases it to the customer, who owns it once the payments are done. The attorneys general found plenty wrong with how that worked in practice. According to the states, Snap used misleading disclosures about what kind of arrangement customers were entering and did not let them see their full contracts. As a result, the states say, some customers who thought their leases lasted no more than 100 days ended up locked into pricier long-term contracts. The states also allege that customers got the runaround when they tried to return products and faced confusing payment terms. The states investigated Snap’s debt collection practices as well. As Bird put it, “Iowans were stuck with a complicated contract with little-to-no way to get customer service, and in some cases, no way to cancel their contract.” Snap maintains that its practices complied with the law, and the settlement includes no admission otherwise.
Even so, the settlement takes on those problems. Snap may no longer advertise its leases as loans or credit, or as “same as cash” unless it is advertising an early-payoff option that truly costs no more than the cash price. Before customers sign, Snap must let them review the full lease and must list its total cost ahead of, or more prominently than, any cheaper early-payoff price. Its ads may not falsely claim that its leases will raise anyone’s credit score. It may not threaten to repossess merchandise over missed lease payments if repossession is not its actual practice. And it must tell customers they can end a lease, stop charging them while it processes a cancellation, and give them practical ways to return leased products.
The most tangible win is the relief. Snap will cancel every remaining payment on leases signed in the 17 states from 2017 through 2022 that Snap still held as of last November and had written off on its books, even though customers still owed the money. That covers 303,223 consumers and $662,102,518 in balances. Those customers keep their merchandise and owe nothing more. Snap will also pay the states $2.75 million, a tiny fraction of the settlement. In other words, these attorneys general put consumers ahead of their own state coffers.
State action here filled a real gap. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Snap over similar claims in 2023, but a federal district court in Utah ruled that Snap’s lease agreements were not credit under the Truth in Lending Act and two other federal consumer laws. The CFPB dropped the case last year. State law, by contrast, does not hinge on that question: Every one of these states has a law written specifically for lease-to-own contracts. As with the TP-Link suits, we see the distinctive power of state attorneys general as they deliver relief to consumers that Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies often can’t.
Just as notable is who did this. Alongside Iowa and Nebraska, the negotiating committee included Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming joined them. Every one of the 17 states has a Republican attorney general.
That matters. Multistate consumer investigations have typically run through sprawling bipartisan coalitions, often coordinated through the National Association of Attorneys General. Those coalitions can investigate for years and produce little more than a press release. While Republican attorneys general have long banded together to challenge federal overreach, it has been far rarer for more than a dozen of them to team up on a consumer case like this one. Here they did, and instead of empty talk, they locked down more than $662 million in restitution for consumers.
Once again, citizens need attorneys general who get results, and once again, Brenna Bird and Mike Hilgers, joined by red-state colleagues from Florida to Idaho, have delivered.