MoneyLion Advertises Instacash at 0% APR. The Turbo Fee and Required Membership Tell a Different Story.

What MoneyLion advertises, and what it charges

MoneyLion markets its Instacash advances on a single, simple promise: 0% APR. No interest, nothing added to what you borrow. For a consumer weighing a short-term advance against an overdraft charge or a payday loan, that framing does the entire selling job.

The advertised zero is not what an Instacash advance costs. Getting the money quickly — which is the reason most people reach for the product at all — carries a separate charge MoneyLion calls a Turbo fee, running as high as $8.99 for every $100 advanced. And the advance limits that make the product worth using are gated behind a paid membership starting at $19.99 per month and going up from there. Neither charge is labeled interest. Both are paid in order to borrow.

Why a charge you cannot avoid is part of the price of the money

There is a real difference between an add-on a consumer chooses and a charge built into the transaction. A fee you can decline and still receive the same product is genuinely optional. A fee you must pay to receive the money on the timeline the product is sold on is not optional in any meaningful sense — it is the price of the money, wearing a different name.

That is the heart of this investigation. Stack a Turbo fee and a required monthly membership on top of a short-term advance repaid in a matter of days or weeks, and the annualized cost of that borrowing stops resembling zero. The New York Attorney General alleges that MoneyLion's charges push effective rates far above the advertised 0%, reaching as high as 750%. A number in that range is not a rounding error against a claim of zero. It is the opposite of the claim.

The membership that outlasts the decision to stop

The membership charge carries a second problem. Consumers report that they could not cancel their MoneyLion membership until any outstanding advance was repaid — meaning the monthly fee keeps running for exactly as long as the borrowing does, and a consumer who decides the product is not worth the money cannot act on that decision until the balance is gone.

A subscription a borrower cannot exit while they still owe behaves less like a membership and more like a recurring charge attached to the loan itself. It also compounds the disclosure problem: the longer repayment takes, the more months of membership the advance quietly costs, and none of that appears anywhere in the 0% figure the borrower was shown.

What the law requires

Federal law does not let a lender decide for itself which of its charges count. Federal lending-disclosure law requires the cost of credit to be disclosed as a finance charge and expressed as an annual percentage rate, so a borrower can measure one offer against another on the same terms. Presenting an advance as 0% APR while a required membership and an instant-delivery fee supply the real cost of the borrowing is the precise mismatch those disclosure rules exist to prevent.

The limits are not only about disclosure. Where the annualized cost of an advance exceeds a state's usury cap, the advance is unlawful — not merely poorly explained. Servicemembers and their dependents have a separate federal ceiling of 36%, which a cost measured in the hundreds of percent would come nowhere near satisfying. And state consumer protection statutes, which exist in all fifty states, independently prohibit deceptive "0% APR" framing whatever the arithmetic ultimately shows.

The New York Attorney General's pending action against MoneyLion targets this same conduct.

Who may be affected, and what a claim can seek

You may be affected if you took an Instacash advance from MoneyLion and paid a Turbo fee to receive the money quickly, paid a monthly membership fee to access meaningful advance limits, or both — while understanding from MoneyLion's own marketing that the advance carried no interest. Having since deleted the app or closed the account does not exclude you; what matters is that the charges were made. The claim reaches back roughly four years.

What a claim seeks begins with the money actually paid out: the Turbo fees and the membership charges, treated as what we contend they always were — the cost of the credit. Where a state's usury limit was exceeded, that state's law may require unlawful interest to be returned, in some states with an added penalty. Federal disclosure law and state consumer protection statutes can supply statutory damages and attorney fees on top. No one can tell an individual what their claim is worth without first looking at their actual charge history.

What Maginnis Howard is doing

Maginnis Howard is a consumer protection firm investigating whether MoneyLion's Turbo fees and mandatory membership charges functioned as undisclosed finance charges on advances sold to the public as 0% APR. We are collecting and reviewing individual charge histories to establish what these advances actually cost the people who took them.

Private individual arbitration is the route we expect these claims to take. Having your situation reviewed costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If you used Instacash and paid to get your own money faster — or paid a monthly fee for the privilege of borrowing at all — we would like to see your records.

The Advance, As Advertised* vs. What the Advance Actually Cost*

Figures shown are illustrative examples, not records of an actual transaction; your amounts may differ.

Frequently asked questions

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