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- I, that is the dumbest thing I've ever done for a video. Sometimes when I'm doing these investigations, I'll start off by cracking jokes about how I'm about to get scammed, but not this time. I gave this company all of my personal information for this video, address, social security number, bank account number. You name it, all to answer a single seemingly simple question. Today, we have a big one. Now these guys have been around for decades and the promise sounds great.
Get your hands on tech, furniture for a small weekly price, return it whatever you want, or buy and actually own it. But this is a company who offer a PlayStation 5 with a thousand plus dollar cash price. And if you can rent it all the way through the end of the term, you can spend over $2,000 on a standard PS5, which really leads me with the question of, is Rent-A-Center a scam? Okay, so that did not go as planned. We walked in and they have no PlayStations. They have TVs and a whole lot of furniture and that is it. But as we started to look at them for this video, Rent-A-Center is so much bigger
and so much more sophisticated than just selling you TVs and renting you PlayStations and couches and stuff, that I think that it really does merit, I think, a deeper look. Unfortunately, that deeper look is gonna have to wait until I can actually get my hands on something from Rent-A-Center, 'cause this one told me they're out of PlayStations. And the online store apparently doesn't work, which I find that hard to believe. So getting started online just by submitting an order or you can visit a Rent-A-Center store. Tried that, didn't work. Step two, payment set up and delivery.
We'll finalize your order details, set up a payment plan, and schedule a free delivery or curbside pickup where available, okay. And then, enjoy worry free with our easy ownership options, product repairs included during the life of the agreement, and no long-term commitment. Okay, let's dive in. This is one of those ones where I know that maybe not all of us read the fine print on things. This is one where you should probably read some fine print. Do I need a good credit score to rent from Rent-A-Center? No.
We consider many factors in reviewing your application and regularly approve customers with less than perfect credit history. What is Rent-A-Center's return policy? At any time, you can contact your store to schedule a return of your product, or return the merchandise in person and pause your payments. When you're ready, you can come back, reinstate your agreement to get the same or comparable item, and pick up your payments right where you left off. So you can see how easily this could get you into trouble.
You look at it and go, "30 bucks a week? I can handle that, no problem." But maybe four or five months from now, you can't handle that anymore. You have to return it, and you can very easily end up with literally nothing. You borrowed a PlayStation for four or five months, and you spent more than the entire PlayStation was worth for the privilege. I'm gonna keep going. The longer I go here, the more visibly upset I'm gonna get. So this is me. I'm seven-tenths upset.
See how far we make it by the end. So your options are small, flexible payments. You can own it when you're ready, or you can pick up where you left off. So here's the PS5. So let's just choose the $23.99 a week option. So with this, I can either pay the weekly amount for 82 weeks, or after three months of paying, I can give them the cash price to own it. But then I would be paying $264 more than what the PS5 should actually cost. So why would anyone do this? Well, the answer is no one does it at all. It's here to give you a same as cash price value. Just pay it off in three months, bro. When in reality if you could pay it off in three months, you would absolutely not be going through Rent-A-Center.
It all just feels so predatory, right, and it just feels needlessly complicated. Like, why does it have to be like this? So I've gone through the initial process and the information they ask about you is your email address, phone number, and the last four digits of your social security number. - [Alex] Holy crap, that's invasive. - They didn't ask for my name or anything. I gave them that. They pulled up my name, date of birth, my address, every address I've lived in the last 10 years instantly. So that's great, I mean super convenient, right? So they approved me to get $2,000 worth of stuff.
But when I went through that process, the online account's like, good job, you're approved. Let's go add more stuff to your cart, yada, yada, yada. But at the same time, the store has reached out and they've texted me basically and like, "Oh hey, we actually don't have that PS5 in stock. We're gonna try to find you another one." I'm like, "Okay." So I'm pre-approved. That's the good news, right? I can get myself a PS5, everything's fine once they track one down, except, I'm not pre-approved. Let me read you an email that I just received.
"Hey," this is from the store, "Hey, we actually need just a little bit more information to complete your rental form." You know, we already have your social security number, your date of birth, your phone number, your address, all that kinda stuff. We just need a couple more things. I'm just gonna list off real quick. "We need your source of income, so the name of your company, address, phone number, department, pay cycle and pay stub," casual, "your landlord, so please tell us the name of your landlord, the phone number when you moved in. We need four personal references, first and last name, phone number, relationship, and send us a photo of your ID or driver's license."
I don't like this, I don't like this, I don't like this. If you can believe it, this is going even farther off the rails. So after they sent me that email asking for all that personal information, that would almost certainly make it clear that I am a YouTuber doing a video on their product, I responded to the guy. So first of all, he did text me saying that they did find a PS5 for the same amount of money that I had agreed to online, so that's great. But then I responded saying, "Hey, I looked at the email and that feels like way too much information for renting a game console.
The online account said it was already approved." He responded, "We are rent to own and we need to verify all that information before we are able to delivery or release any of our products. We also use Acima to finance some of our products. They ask for less information." So Acima, come to find out after a little bit of Googling, is another Rent-A-Center brand. So my understanding is that the corporate, like parent company of Rent-A-Center is called Upbound Group. They used to be called Rent-A-Center. They got sued a bunch, as we'll probably discuss later, so they rebranded as the Upbound Group and they have multiple like divisions, right? So there's Rent-A-Center,
which actually has the physical items in the stores, but Acima is kind of like the same concept, except at other retailers. So I told him, "Yes, I would love to check that out. Acima works on the items from your store?" And he responded, "Yes, correct. I'll send the link now." So we're like three layers deep here, and that if you are unable to be approved or you're not willing to give them all the information to Rent-A-Center their side brand, Acima, will apparently also let you do the same thing, but presumably with less information needed.
I just feel like this is garbage all the way down. Like, we just keep digging and it just gets worse and worse. 404 page not found. Are you kidding me? The link he gave me just doesn't work. Great, great. Then, let's try this. Let's just try to shop online. Let's get something from, I don't know, Walmart. That feels reasonable enough. Oh, okay, they're gonna tell me the basics of leasing. So your path to ownership is this.
"Acima owns the lease items. If you make all of the lease payments, or use an early purchase option, you will own the property. If you do not use an early purchase option, you may pay more than double the retail price." So if you don't early purchase, you can pay more than double. Let's do this. Let's see what it would cost if I bought a PS5. So PS5 is what, $650 now? Let's try that. So 65000, $650, which is the cost of my PS5, and the payment, let's just do monthly, just to make it clean and simple compared to Rent-A-Center. What is my estimate? My initial payment's $49 a month. It would give me 12 payments, which means that I will end up spending $1663! That's slightly better than Rent-A-Center, but not by much.
Oh, and here we go. It is the exact same thing. So they're asking for the mobile phone number, the last four digits of your social security number, and the email. Alright, fine, let me go through the application and we'll see what happens on the other side. Probably sadness. "Sorry, we were unable to approve you at this time." - [Alex] What the, what? - I can apply again in 60 days. Okay, so this was actually much more invasive than the Rent-A-Center. So I gave them the initial bit of information like I did with Rent-A-Center, you know, the last four of my social security number,
phone number, and email. With Rent-A-Center, that was enough for them to pull up all of my information and I got the approval from that point, until they asked for stuff over email. Acima said that was not enough, so I had to give them my full social security number, my name, date of birth, my address, and then a second page asked for my driver's license, my ID, my bank account number. I (beep) gave it to them, by the way, just so you know. They also asked for my source of income, how often I'm paid, all this stuff.
I should have lied. I gave them that. I gave them all of that, and they have now told me that I have been not approved. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done. The S word, it's thrown around a lot on this channel: scam, I mean, and. - [Alex] Oh, thank God. - I'm not gonna lie, I wanna like sit down. I wanna actually like dive deeper on Rent-A-Center, on Acima, on the Upbound Group as a whole, but I, this is nasty, like, this is bad.
Okay, let's actually take a second and go over what just happened here. I gave Acima, again a company fully owned by Rent-A-Center, my full social security number, my address, my employment info, my bank account number, my pay schedule, my income. I stupidly handed over everything they asked for, and I got rejected by a company whose entire pitch is, "No credit needed. We approve people that other places won't." So then who the (beep) do you actually approve? Seriously? Like they're not gonna tell me. But it does kind of make you wonder that if a business model that is built on charging almost $2,000 for a used PS5
only works if you quite literally have no other choice. But look, maybe this was just me, right? It was just my experience. I got unlucky. Well, about that. Back in 2022, the California Attorney General sued Rent-A-Center, who ended up settling for $15.5 million. The state alleged they had a whole list of things, bait and switch advertising, forced auto renewal payments, limiting how customers could return items, so they got stuck on longer payment plans. And California specifically called out Rent-A-Center
for inflating their cash values by 15% across the board to force customers to pay more. So when I found that $800 cash price on a $650 PS5, yeah, that's no coincidence. And California isn't the only one. In 2023, Massachusetts hit them for another 8.75 million for what the Attorney General there called quote, "Abusive misconduct targeting low-income communities." These stories are almost even worse. Rent-A-Center allegedly filed criminal charges to collect debt, left harassing and obscene phone calls, and threatened to repossess household items over missed payments.
The Wikipedia page is great actually. Underneath all the jargon about how they do all these donations, there's just a whole laundry list of all the times that they've gotten in trouble with local and federal governments. Like, it is just a company who has been a serial problem. It's almost like they take advantage of people, and everyone has to give 'em a slap on the wrist every once in a while, and they just keep doing it. Now maybe a lot of this, although certainly not all of it, is technically legal, but Rent-A-Center honestly has one of the scummiest business models I have ever seen. Because believe me, there are so many better options out there.
Used stuff off of Facebook marketplace, you really do have a larger expense. A loan from a credit union is gonna give you way lower rates than Rent-A-Center. And even something like Klarna or Afterpay is probably a better option. Although, the whole buy now pay later thing is a separate can of worms. We should do a video on it later. But like, it just, it's all bad all the way down. In January of 2025, Upbound bought a fintech company called Brigit. Brigit does quote, "earned wage access," basically letting you tap into your paycheck before your payday, plus like some credit building stuff.
They paid $460 million for it. But definitely, definitely don't call it a payday loan, of course not. It's just a way to get access to your paycheck before it actually arrives. Sure. And here's my favorite part. The Upbound Group has a really touching company mission. "Elevate financial opportunity for all." What are you talking about? Financial opportunity for you, only you! Literally, no one else wins in this scenario! It is just you!
Now, we did try to reach out to Upbound to get their comment on, well, all of this. And it turns out, this is hard to believe, there's actually no press contact anywhere on their website. This is a publicly traded billion dollar company that owns three consumer brands, and yet, the only way to contact corporate is through investor relations. And so in totally unrelated news, I, Austin Evans, am now a proud shareholder of the Upbound Group. Yes, my friends, I've spent $19.17 for a single share of the Upbound Group to make sure that I can not only take advantage of their investor relations portal, 'cause I have a lot of questions about the business model, but also as of recording this video,
their earnings call is in three days. And I cannot wait to join and ask some questions, about exactly how their business model really works. And so if you too would like to join me in doing wildly irresponsible things for content and see where this lands, definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel, and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling button. Also quick PSA. If you've ever been a Rent-A-Center customer in either California or Massachusetts, you should actually look up those settlements. They may actually owe you some money, but until next time, my friends, I'm gonna go check my credit score and pretend that none of this ever happened.
Well, I'll be doing that at least until I wait for the next board meeting, where I will be there. Wait, can I actually go to the physical board meeting? I don't think so. Well, maybe.
