Industry News

Federal Court Agrees, Merchant Cash Advances Not Loans or Usurious

By now, numerous judges in the New York Supreme Court have concurred that purchases of future receivables are not loans nor usurious, yet challenges to these contracts continue. In the latest landmark ruling, defendants/counterclaim plaintiffs Epazz, Inc., Cynergy Corporation, and Shaun Passley a/k/a Shaun A. Passley, moved to have the original action involving their merchant cash advance dispute transferred from state court to federal court, perhaps hoping for a different opinion on whether such agreements are usurious.

The law was not on their side. In the Southern District of New York, a federal court, the Honorable Louis L. Stanton echoed on May 9th, 2017, what state judges have been saying all along, that a purchase is not a loan because the purchased receipts are not payable absolutely.

In this case, the “receipts purchased amounts” are not payable absolutely. Payment depends upon a crucial contingency: the continued collection of receipts by Epazz from its customers. TVT [TVT Capital] is only entitled to recover 15% of Epazz’s daily receipts, and if Epazz’s sales decline or cease the receipts purchased amounts might never be paid in full. See counterclaims, Exhs. A-C at 1. The agreements specifically provide that “Payments made to FUNDER in respect to the full amount of the Receipts shall be conditioned upon Merchant’s sale of products and services and the payment therefore by Merchant’s customers in the manner provided in Section 1.1.” Id. at 3 § 1.9.

Defendants’ argument that the actual daily payments ensure that TVT will be paid the full receipts purchased amounts within approximately 61 to 180 business days, id. ¶¶ 33-47, is contradicted by the reconciliation provisions which provide if the daily payments are greater than 15% of Epazz’s daily receipts, TVT must credit the difference to Epazz, thus limiting Epazz’s obligation to 15% of daily receipts. No allegation is made that TVT ever denied Epazz’s request to reconcile the daily payments. TVT’s right to collect the receipts purchased amounts from Epazz is in fact contingent on Epazz’s continued collection of receipts. See Kardovich v. Pfizer, Inc., 97 F. Supp. 3d 131, 140 (E.D.N.Y. 2015), quoting Amidax Trading Grp. v. S.W.I.F.T. SCRL, 671 F.3d 140, 147 (2d Cir. 2011) (“Where a conclusory allegation in the complaint is contradicted by a document attached to the complaint, the document controls and the allegation is not accepted as true”).

None of the defendants’ arguments, Counterclaims ¶¶ 51-109, change the fact that whether the receipts purchased amounts will be paid in full, or when they will be paid, cannot be known because payment is contingent on Epazz generating sufficient receipts from its customers; and Epazz, rather than TVT, controls whether daily payments will be reconciled.

The decision relies heavily on the reconciliation clause common to merchant cash advance agreements, whereby merchants can adjust their daily ACH amounts to correlate with their actual sales activity. This concept is explained at length in the Merchant Cash Advance Basics training course.

Furthermore, the court was incredulous over the defendants’ claim that they actually wanted loans but were instead fraudulently induced into purchase agreements.

Defendants do not claim that they were misled with regard to the amount of their payment obligation, only that they were misled into believing that their repayment obligation would be absolute when it actually is contingent. Their injury from that is unclear.

In short, the judge suggests that entering into a loan would’ve been worse because it was absolutely repayable, whereas the purchase agreement was not. So how could they have been damaged?

The entire decision surrounding all the claims can be downloaded here.

The case is Colonial Funding Network, Inc. as servicing provider for TVT Capital, LLC v. Epazz, Inc. Cynergy Corporation, and Shaun Passley a/k/a Shaun A. Passley in the United States District Court’s Southern District of New York. Case: 1:16-cv-05948-LLS.

Defendants Shaun Passley and Epazz also lost challenges in another merchant cash advance case in the New York Supreme Court.

Exercise of Ordinary Intelligence Would’ve Revealed Merchant Cash Advance Contract Was Not a Loan, Court Says

In the New York Supreme Court, the Honorable Linda S. Jamieson was tasked with ruling on twelve causes of action in a merchant cash advance contract case. While the 18-page decision covers a lot of ground, one notable section was the plaintiffs’ request for rescission based on “misrepresentations or unilateral mistake” and “damages for fraudulent inducement.” According to the order, the plaintiffs, K9 Bytes, Inc., Epazz, Inc., Strantin, Inc., MS Health Inc., and Shaun Passley, “claim that the defendants misled them by representing that they were entering into “loans governed by usury laws,” but instead caused them “to enter into ‘merchant agreements.'” Exhibits on the docket attached by the plaintiffs purport to demonstrate the word loan being used in communications, though the judge noted that the plaintiffs failed to identify how the individuals in those communications specifically attributed to the defendants. Nevertheless, the judge was unmoved by plaintiffs given the overt language spelled out in the contract itself.

[The plaintiffs] state that they would not have knowingly entered into merchant agreements, because what they really wanted were loans. Indeed, plaintiffs allege that “the word ‘purchase’ or ‘sale’ would have caused Passley to decline a transaction with [defendants] because a loan – the product Passley wanted to obtain – is not a purchase or sale.”

A review of the contracts in this action shows that not only do they all clearly state that they involve purchases or sales, but they all expressly state they are not loans. Even if someone were confused by the contracts, or did not understand the obligation or the process, by reading the documents, one would grasp immediately that they certainly were not straightforward loans. The very first heading on the page was “Merchant Agreement,” and the second heading says “Purchase and Sale of Future Receivables.”

[…] For plaintiffs to state that they would not have entered into a purchase or sale if they had known that that is what they were doing is utterly undermined by the documents themselves. As the Second Department has held, in Karsanow v. Kuehlewein, 232 A.D.2d 458, 459, 648 NY.S.2d 465, 466 (2d Dept. 1996), “the subject provision was clearly set out in the … agreements, and where a party has the means available to him of knowing by the exercise of ordinary intelligence the truth or real quality of the subject of the representation, he must make use of those means or he will not be heard to complain that he was induced to enter into the transaction by misrepresentations.” So too here, plaintiffs had the means to understand that the agreements set forth that they were not loans. As it has long been settled that a party is bound by that which it signs, the Court finds that the ninth cause of action, for recission based on misrepresentation or mistake, and the tenth cause of action, for fraudulent inducement based on misrepresentation, must be dismissed as a matter of law. Pimpinello v. Swift & Co., 253 N.Y. 159, 162-63 (1930) (“the signer of a deed or other instrument, expressive of a jural act, is conclusively bound thereby. That his mind never gave asset to the terms expressed is not material. If the signer could read the instrument, not to have read it was gross negligence; if he could not have read it, not to procure it to be read was equally negligent; in either case the writing binds him.”).

The plaintiffs are likely to be disappointed with the rest of the ruling as well. The decision can be found in the New York Supreme Court in the County of Westchester under Index Number 54755/2016 or can be downloaded in full here.