LendingTree CEO: Metrics in Place to Detect Terrorists Who Try to Borrow

Although the San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook was able to borrow $28,500 from a San Francisco online lender weeks before the vicious attack, LendingTree (NASDAQ:TREE) CEO Doug Lebda says “it looked like a normal course of business for someone who qualified for a loan.”

During an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria Lebda discussed how the rampage has impacted the online lending business from a regulatory standpoint.

"So far there [have] not been any regulatory changes and I’m not really sure what they could be. We worked with over 400 lenders at LendingTree, we are a marketplace that connects consumers and lenders and there’s already so many regulations including when somebody fills out a loan application, it gets run through terrorist databases and it gets run through anti-money laundering statue databases etc.,” he said.

Lebda also said lending standards forbid discrimination.

“Whenever you make a loan, if somebody has a social security number you’re also not allowed to discriminate. So, it would be impossible for a lender to take somebody who is a U.S. citizen, has good credit and a social security number and actually not make them a loan,” he said.

When asked if he thinks metrics are in place to identify whether a terrorist is trying to borrow money he said: “Absolutely… if you think about the opposite, if you didn’t make a loan to somebody who was a Muslim or Arabic and wasn’t in a database, you’d probably be sued for that and you’d get in serious trouble for it.”