Military veterans Anthony and Gloria Harrison thought they'd found a brief reprieve from mounting financial troubles when they secured $12,000 to cover medical and emergency personal expenses, according to court documents.

Pensioned, disabled and out of work due to illness, Anthony Harrison googled financial service providers who might lend to a family in such straits, his court filings read. He found Nevada-based FIP LLC, which does business as Future Income Payments LLC and markets itself as “the nation's pension cash-advance leader.”

But now, a suit filed on the Harrisons' behalf in federal court by a Broward law firm alleges FIP took advantage of the vulnerable couple, duping them into a deal requiring $168,000 to repay a $12,000 loan. The deal required 84 monthly payments of $2,000 each—the equivalent of a nearly 186 percent annual interest rate, according to the complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

“This is a company that is engaged in the business of targeting and marketing to military veterans, retried people, disabled people and others who receive pensions,” plaintiffs counsel Marc A. Wites, of the Wites Law Firm in Lighthouse Point, Florida, said. “They're looking for a subset of those people who are in financial straits. They are making usurious loans to them. I would even go so far as to say wildly usurious loans.”

Cash advance companies often lend to clients who traditional lenders classify as high-risk borrowers.

It appears FIP purchases pensions, offering upfront lump sums to clients willing to assign it the rights to their income stream. Its website describes it as “America's largest pension cash flow originator,” with more than $300 million in completed transactions. The company buys and sells secondary-market pension cash flows, or structured cash flows, and manages a broad range of assets. It has more than 200 employees and a global presence, according to its marketing material.

FIP did not immediately return a phone call to its corporate headquarters seeking comment. No attorney has entered an appearance on its behalf in the Florida case. And North Carolina attorney Ripley Rand, the Womble Bond Dickinson partner who has represented the company or its affiliate in the past, did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

FIP has also been the focus of regulatory action in multiple states, including an appeal pending in the Ninth Circuit in a suit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since 2015, the Los Angeles City Attorney and officials in Colorado, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York, Washington, Iowa and Pennsylvania have taken regulatory action over the corporation's lending practices. In Minnesota, Attorney General Lori Swanson filed suit in August against Future Income Payments LLC of Delaware and FIP LLC of Nevada, alleging the firms violated state lending laws by issuing loans without a license.

“The companies sought to evade state lending laws by falsely characterizing the transactions as 'purchase agreements' of a pension, not a loan,” a notice from Swanson's office stated.

Future Income Payments LLC relocated to Nevada, but was once based in Irvine, California, where the state Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency issued a desist and refrain order, barring it from engaging in lending or brokerage services without the proper license.

In September, JTB Law Group, Sommers Schwartz, and Finkelstein & Krinsk—law firms from New Jersey, Michigan and California, respectively—filed suit in federal court in California on behalf of retired and disabled veterans alleging “a massive fraud.”

FIP's critics call it a predatory lender, but its marketing material suggest the company does not make loans, but instead purchases pensions as an asset.

The Florida suit is the latest.

“It's not as if the states and federal government are not aware of this firm and what they're doing,” Wites said. “They are going to continue doing business until either a) a government entity tells them to stop, … or until a significant number of cases or a class causes them to stop.”