Native American tribes offer short-term loans. Consumers say they are being gouged.

Because her home state of Oregon has interest-rate caps on some loans that are made in the state, she didn’t pay much attention to the annual rate on such a small loan.

“Loan at Last” is one of dozens of tribal-owned lenders operating across the country, often with little oversight from state or federal regulators who monitor all other banks and lending institutions.

Tribal lenders say they are exempt from state and federal lending regulations because they are sovereign, federally recognized nations, which they disclose in fine print on their websites and loan contracts.

But whether and how tribal lenders should be regulated increasingly has been a point of debate at the center of dozens of federal and state lawsuits over the last decade.

The national office of the Better Business Bureau does not track complaints about tribal lenders specifically but considers complaints related to the tribal loans as payday lender complaints and financial services complaints.

Several borrowers of tribal loans say they find it hard to distinguish between state-regulated payday lenders, some of which have interest-rate caps depending on the state they are operating in, and tribal lenders, which have no caps.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency that educates consumers about high-interest, online loans, would not make an official available for an interview and did not respond to written questions on tribal lending.

Wisconsin does not regulate tribal lenders but has seen an uptick in consumer complaints over the last decade, said Mike Lawton, who oversees bank regulation with the state Department of Financial Institutions, which charters and inspects banks and credit unions in the state.

He said he has found that most tribal lenders are lending to consumers outside of their home states.

“The big question concerning tribal lenders is whether or not they have to comply with Wisconsin laws and other state laws throughout the country,” Lawton said.

Spokeswoman Lisa Schiller of the Better Business Bureau in Wisconsin said her agency started seeing complaints about tribal lending in 2015.

Generally, tribal lenders are quick to respond to disgruntled customers, referring them to the fine print on the loan contract and the website, Schiller said.

Despite the legal gray area of tribal lending, several consumer advocate attorneys say that tribal businesses, when operating beyond their reservations, are subject to state and federal laws, including interest-rate caps in some states.

Supreme Court has ruled in several cases, cited by the federal judge in the Virginia case, that a Native American tribe’s claim of “sovereign immunity” did not protect individual tribal leaders from being sued by borrowers for violating state laws.

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The Virginia case shows why such lending practices are illegal, said Andrew Guzzo, a plaintiff attorney on the case who has sued tribal leaders who run online loan operations and tracked their lending practices for years.

Saunders has been working on this issue for over a decade and said if consumers find themselves with a tribal loan that exceeds the interest rates in their states, they should consider stopping payment and revoking any authorization for an automatic debit from their accounts.

In complaints to the Better Business Bureau and interviews with the Journal Sentinel, several borrowers of tribal loans say money was taken from their account even after their loan was paid or more was taken out than what was stipulated on their contract.

His loan, through Greenline Loans, which is owned by the Lac du Flambeau Band of Chippewa Indians in Vilas County, balked at payment by check, instead insisting on automatic bank debits, he said.