System monitors accounts hourly and takes funds the moment they arrive
The Federal Court penalised a payday lender with $3.5 million for unfair loan terms that let it take money from customers' accounts without warning.
In Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Venture 5 Group Pty Ltd [2026] FCA 1278, handed down on 31 August 2026, the court found that Venture 5 Group Pty Ltd, trading as CashnGo, had used contract terms that broke the law banning unfair terms in standard consumer contracts.
The corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), alleged, and CashnGo admitted, that seven terms in its loans were unfair. Two of them let CashnGo monitor a borrower's bank account every hour and take overdue repayments the moment money arrived, without saying when, how much or how often.
The loans ran from $300 to $2,000 over two to six months. CashnGo marketed them to people who needed cash fast and had poor credit records, charging a 20 percent set-up fee plus 4 percent a month.
The court found that CashnGo used the automated withdrawals on 658,245 occasions between 9 November 2023 and 30 June 2026, succeeding 124,101 times and collecting about $9.4 million. It noted that 37,893 borrowers were left with $5 or less at least once, and that 9,844 faced this five or more times.
Since 9 November 2023, a business can be penalised for putting unfair terms in these contracts or acting on them. The court held that CashnGo broke that law on at least 848,000 occasions.
The court declared all seven terms void, four of them void from the start, and permanently stopped CashnGo from using them or similar terms. It ordered the two terms behind the withdrawals replaced with new wording, and told CashnGo to post a notice about its conduct on its website.
The court said that the terms and the withdrawals were built into CashnGo's business and were designed by senior management, not junior staff, and that the company kept using two of the terms after the case began. CashnGo's cooperation with ASIC, including its admissions and an agreed statement of facts, lowered the penalty ASIC would otherwise have sought.
Because CashnGo's revenue had fallen, the court let it pay the penalty in three instalments up to 30 June 2028, and ordered it to pay ASIC's costs of $100,000.
