MoneyLion reviews: complaints & concerns

Recent MoneyLion complaints highlight a few patterns:

• Surprise charges: Users claim the app keeps pulling $9.99-$33 “membership” or loan payments even after they cancel or never finish a loan, sometimes while they’re locked out of their accounts.
• Stacked fees: Reviews call out an $11 turbo fee on every $100 Instacash draw, repeated tip prompts up to 10 %, and extra fees because withdrawals are capped at $100 increments.
• Hard-to-get cash: People approved for $300+ say the app suddenly drops their limit to $25, shows “not eligible,” or errors out at the last step—yet still charges a $3.99 fee or asks for tips.
• Buggy & lockouts: Forced updates, endless “fine-tuning” messages, selfie rejections and crash loops leave some customers unable to log in or access money for days.
• Ghost support: Thirty-minute holds, disappearing chats and copy-paste emails mean disputes, fraud reports and account-deletion requests often go nowhere.

We combed through 40-plus recent “scam”-tagged reviews and the pattern is loud: people say MoneyLion keeps pulling money even after they cancel and then locks them out with an “oops, we’re fine-tuning something” error, making refunds nearly impossible. Several users have already reported the company to the CFPB and are threatening bigger investigations.

Another cluster of complaints targets the Credit Builder Plus loan—customers claim they had to front their own cash, waited 10-14 business days (or longer) to get it back, and still got dinged with surprise fees or early withdrawals that triggered overdrafts. Instacash tips auto-reset to 10%, and charges sometimes hit before pay-day, adding more fees that borrowers didn’t expect.

Identity and data worries round things out: selfies won’t verify, accounts can’t be deleted, and customer support bounces between long hold times and unhelpful bots. A few reviewers even allege fraudulent charges in the hundreds and say they lost access to thousands, calling the app “predatory” and “financial hostage.”

We found five overdraft-related complaints about MoneyLion, all tied to surprise withdrawals that pushed accounts into the red.

Users say the app pulled repayments before payday, hit them with double or multiple charges for the same balance, shifted due dates earlier after a bank-connection glitch, and kept drafting cash because they couldn’t update bank details; one also reports their entire balance was taken and no refund offered.

In September 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued MoneyLion, saying its cash-advance membership program hit users with illegal fees and made canceling tough. More trouble followed on May 22, 2025, when the New York Attorney General took aim at the Instacash product, accusing MoneyLion of pitching “0 % APR” advances while hiding triple-digit interest through required turbo-deposit fees and pressured tips, shrinking advance amounts to spur more fee-bearing transactions, pulling money based on estimated wages (which sometimes led to overdrafts), and throwing up roadblocks when people tried to stop repayments.