Also, the typical borrowers tend to have at most a rudimentary knowledge of finance so they don't understand the terms of the loan. Sometimes they don't even bother reading the loan agreement. This makes anecdotal evidence extra unreliable.
I don't really get how they arrive at their numbers but on first glance it looks insane. On the $10k loan with the $1,300 fee. If you had daily sales of $1,000 you'd pay the loan off in 100 days making the APR somewhere around 50%.
They are frequently fee-based, not rate based. And are frequently less than a year with the rate being highlighted, not the APR.