If you’ve Googled “Florida MCA usury” you’ve seen the same marketing pitch a hundred times on different marketing articles. Your effective APR is 200%, Florida caps interest at 18%, criminal usury kicks in past 25%, so your advance is void and the funder’s basically going to prison. Clean story, and if you just take it on it’s word, you’ll think you have a slam dunk situation. It’s also mostly wrong in Florida, and the reason is one case that almost nobody running those ads wants to put in front of you.
Craton is the wall everyone walks into
In 2021 Florida’s Third DCA decided Craton Entertainment v. Merchant Capital Group - the funder doing business as Greenbox. Merchant defaulted, got sued, threw everything back in terms of a defense strategy in order to win the case, and avoid a judgement. The defendant posited every defense possible undermining the lenders case, such as: disguised loan, usury, twelve counterclaims, the works. Unfortunately the defendant lost at the trial court. Then again on appeal.
The court said the thing New York courts say: if repayment is genuinely contingent on the business earning revenue, and a real piece of the funder’s money is at risk, it’s a purchase and not a loan, and Florida’s usury statute doesn’t reach it. This is essentially the defense strategy that lenders use, when someone gets an idea about challenging the nature of the MCA. The entire MCA industry is built on the premise that this is not a loan, this is an advance. The lender is taking all the risk when they issue it, because what they’ve bought is a % of your future receivables, and they take through a fixed ACH daily, or weekly.
The state has thin MCA case law and the one appellate decision it does have went the funder’s way.
While we’re here, the “25% is a felony” line floating around the relief blogs is sloppy and inaccurate. Criminal usury starts at 25%, sure, but the third-degree felony tier is 45% and up.
The leverage lives in conduct
Here’s what Craton case left wide open, and it’s the whole game. The court looked at the four corners of a contract that had a working reconciliation provision. It pointedly did not bless whatever the funder did after the ink dried.
That gap is where a Florida case actually gets won. In practice, when a funder ignores your reconciliation requests and just keeps taking the same fixed daily ACH whether you did $40k that week or $4k - that is not something the courts will approve or take lightly. This is the exact conduct that gets a lenders case thrown out, and the entire transaction invalidated. The crux of the reconciliation clause is why an MCA remains an MCA, and not a loan in disguise as an MCA. New York’s AG built a billion-dollar-plus judgment against Yellowstone on that exact conduct theory, and the Second Circuit ran the same play in Fleetwood v. Richmond Capital.
So the first question we ask isn’t “what’s your APR.” It’s: did you email them asking to reconcile, and did they blow you off. If you sent your bank statements in a timely manner, and the lender refused to reply, or refused to acknowledge it, and denied your claims, then a claim can be made the lender violated the MCA agreement.
FDUTPA does work usury can’t
Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act is the least used tool in the box. Misrepresented costs, reconciliation rights they refused to honor, collectors lying on the phone - that’s FDUTPA, and it carries fee-shifting. The fee-shifting is the quiet part that matters, because it means a claim too small to bankroll on its own suddenly pencils out. That changes who blinks first.
So what actually settles a Florida MCA
Strip the false marketing claims and Florida settlement runs on leverage you build, not a statute. Stop the bleeding first - engage in the reconciliation process in order to lower the bleeding. If your revenue genuinely went down, Delancey Street can use this to help you get leverage in order to lower your daily and weekly payment. Document the conduct, every ignored reconciliation request and every collection call.