The Agency That Finally Noticed
For years, the MCA industry operated in a regulatory space that no federal agency actively policed. The product was not a loan, so banking regulators had limited jurisdiction. It was not a consumer product, so consumer protection agencies treated it as peripheral. The businesses that suffered were small, the amounts were individually modest by federal standards, and the complaints accumulated in no single place. Then the Federal Trade Commission began to pay attention, and the cases it brought demonstrated what practitioners in this space already knew: the industry’s most aggressive actors were not simply pushing the boundaries of commercial practice. They were violating federal law.
The RCG Advances Action and the Twenty Million Dollar Judgment
The first and most significant action was the FTC’s case against RCG Advances and its operator, Jonathan Braun. The FTC alleged that the defendants deceived small businesses about the terms of their advances, made unauthorized withdrawals exceeding the agreed amounts, required personal guarantees while advertising that none were needed, and enforced confessions of judgment against borrowers who had been misled about the contract terms. In 2024, following a jury trial, the court entered a judgment of over twenty million dollars in monetary relief and civil penalties. Braun was permanently banned from the MCA and debt collection industries. The court described his conduct as exhibiting utter disregard and contempt for consumers, including threats of physical violence directed at business owners who could not pay.
This was not a settlement. It was a trial, a verdict, and a judgment. The FTC litigated the case to conclusion, and the conclusion was unambiguous.
The Permanent Industry Bans
The second action, related to the first, was the imposition of permanent bans. Braun, along with RCG Advances co‑defendant Robert Giardina, was banned from the MCA industry entirely. These are not temporary suspensions. They are lifetime prohibitions, enforced by the court and backed by contempt penalties. The signal this sends to the rest of the industry is that individual operators, not merely corporate entities, can be personally and permanently excluded from the business.
The Forum on Small Business Lending Practices