While it does seem like a scam, I think the "following through" aspect was doomed from a business perspective. Credit, and therefore rates, is based on a consumer's history, not their knowledge. While poor financial decisions can certainly be chalked up to not knowing any better, knowledge of what you should do goes out the door when there's bills to pay and not enough money to cover them all.

Remember, LendUp is likely just a middle man and marketer; it's facilitating the loan, not doing the actual underwriting (and therefore rate setting). Following through would mean exposing the business to risk that customers, in spite of climbing their made up ladder, still made payments. Considering the other shady stuff that this thread is talking about, it doesn't surprise me that they didn't choose to take on that risk.

Of course the irony in all of this is that the very thing that would've prevented customers from making the right choice even though they were gaining financial knowledge is the loans that LendUp was handing out. I wonder if the pitfalls of payday loans was part of that knowledge track. I doubt it.