ZocaLoans

Injury: Predatory lending practices
Defendant: 777 Partners, LLC., doing business as ZocaLoans
Practice: Class Action

Latest Update: April 2025 – The litigation will return to district court after the Seventh Circuit’s decision.

Two weeks after the Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision to allow our client’s case to proceed, the defendants asked the entire Court to review the panel opinion. On April 17, 2025, the Seventh Circuit rejected the defendants’ request for review and so the Court’s opinion of February 19, 2025 stands.

As the appeal is now unquestionably resolved, the case will return to the district court, where we will continue to prosecute our client’s claim.

In 2020 and 2021, a lending operation called ZocaLoans made four high-interest, short-term payday loans to an Illinois resident. All the loans had interest rates greater than 500 percent, and one had an interest rate exceeding 690 percent. Tens of thousands of similar loans have been made to Illinois consumers. 

When the fourth loan came due, the individual reached out to Wallace Miller attorney Matthew J. Goldstein about the astronomically high interest rates. The attorney confirmed what he had suspected: the loans made by ZocaLoans were illegal, and void under Illinois law. 

ZocaLoans is not the only company making these types of illegal loans. Companies across the U.S. are setting up similar businesses to extract as much value as possible at the expense of consumers.  

Loans like those made by ZocaLoans are illegal in almost every state. If a court determines that your loan violates state law, you are likely not required to pay back the loan.  

In fact, individuals who have been targeted by this type of illegal lending practice may be able to recoup the money that they lost, in addition to compensation for the suffering these companies have caused. 

In February of 2022, our client filed a class action lawsuit against 777 Partners and other parties involved in making the illegal loans. Our client is fighting to obtain a court order to stop ZocaLoans from collecting the illegal loans, as well as an order declaring that the loans are void. Our client also seeks, among other things, an award of damages to compensate himself and a class of consumers to whom similar loans were made. 

While ZocaLoans claims to do business on the lands of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, our attorneys discovered that the lender actually operates out of Florida. The entity behind the operation is 777 Partners, LLC, a Miami-based private equity firm, and its affiliates and investors. 

777 Partners and its affiliates and investors are responsible for all substantive aspects of the ZocaLoans lending operation—funding, marketing, loan origination, servicing, electronic funds transfers, and collections—and have made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the high-interest loans. 777 Partners then uses this money to finance big purchases (including full ownership of an Italian sports team).