This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
An 81-year-old woman living on Social Security, told to press her finger to a tablet, not knowing what she was signing. Forged signatures. A 78-year-old native Spanish speaker locked into a $48,000 loan. Sales made in Spanish but documents only provided in English. Sales pitches full of misleading information, if not outright lies.
These are just some of the many horror stories that have come out of the door-to-door solar sales industry in recent years, according to interviews with advocates and attorneys. The tactics read like the work of faceless internet scammers, but are actually being used by charming men and women promising homeowners cheaper, more energy-efficient lives that can go a small way toward saving the planet. In reality, these salespeople often target the elderly or non-English speakers, and trap consumers into loans that they can’t afford.
During the Biden administration, it looked like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was going to step in and regulate aspects of the solar sales and lending industry. But now, under the Trump administration, the CFPB has largely been gutted, and the hope of regulatory change has been snuffed out. That leaves advocates and lawyers in limbo, but most importantly, leaves scam victims vulnerable.
The average residential solar panel installation costs $25,000, which few homeowners can afford to pay out of pocket. That makes taking out loans a popular option; 58 percent of households with solar panels used loans to finance them.
“Our mission is to connect a world in which everyone can live sustainably,” reads one header on the website of GoodLeap, a financial technology firm that provides financing for the construction of residential solar panels. GoodLeap is one of many firms that work with solar contractors to finance solar projects for homeowners—and they’re also the subject of a class action lawsuit for allegedly not complying with California consumer protection law. But before firms like GoodLeap can secure a financing deal, solar salespeople have to go out on foot and pitch homeowners.
The “solar bro” salesman has become a well-known archetype in the world of door-to-door sales. On TikTok and Instagram, young men show off their sales techniques and boast of lavish lifestyles. One solar bro films himself pitching a homeowner who calls herself “broke,” complaining about her high utility costs. He pitches solar to her, promising to save her money. In the video caption: “#millionaire #motivation #salesman.”
On-the-ground solar salespeople are just one element of a deeply interwoven business model that involves contractors and fintech lenders.
“If you look at the solar bros’ Instagrams and all that stuff, you know, it almost reminded me of Wolf of Wall Street where it’s like: OK, make as much money as you can, because there’s no regulation,” said Bryant Dunivan, an attorney in Florida who estimates he’s worked on over 150 solar loan–related cases. To Dunivan, this hypermasculine sales culture is one of the reasons that solar scams have become so prominent. “Once you create a sales culture and it’s all about ‘sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, who’s our highest performer, here’s your bonuses,’ of course you’re going to have people take advantage of that system,” he said.
But advocate after advocate emphasized to me that on-the-ground solar salespeople are just one element of a deeply interwoven business model that involves salespeople, solar contractors, and fintech lenders. In an issue spotlight on the solar loan industry, the CFPB summed up this three-sided business: “For general-purpose loans and home equity financing, there is typically a clear dividing line between the financing contract and the installation contract. For solar-specific loans, the sales, installation, and financing often blend into a single interaction, as salespersons, installers, and lenders may work in concert to consummate the sale of a solar system and financing.”
This business model serves to keep the consumer out of a direct relationship with their contractor. The lending companies serve as intermediaries between the consumer and the contractors, taking money from the consumer and then handing it over to the contractors. Audrey Thornton of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates (HERA), a California-based legal service and policy organization, explained that this arrangement takes power away from consumers.
“The consumer doesn’t have control over when the contractor gets paid or whether the contractor has completed the project before they get paid. So often, in many cases, the lender will release the loan proceeds to the contractor before the project is finished,” she said. Once that happens, Thornton explained, some contractors may simply stop work, leaving homeowners with nonfunctional solar panels, no financial benefits, and a hefty loan to pay off.
ONE OF THE MOST PERNICIOUS sales techniques in the solar industry is the misuse of electronic signatures. In videos of solar salespeople, they’re almost always carrying around a tablet. That’s because many of their sales take place digitally, allowing them to misrepresent the contracts homeowners are signing and even forge signatures entirely.
In one particularly egregious case (de Moura Castro by Hilario v. Loanpal, LLC), a senior citizen with Parkinson’s disease who is “legally blind” and unable to “sign documents, speak coherently, or care for himself” was allegedly duped into a loan by a door-to-door salesperson who sold him on a free government program for senior citizens designed to reduce utility bills. In reality, the senior was signed up for a loan that cost over $50,000. A judge also found that the salesperson used an incorrect email address for the homeowner, who clearly was not technologically literate himself. With that email address, the salesperson allegedly forged the homeowners’ signatures, and even went back in to modify the contract after the fact.
This case is one that claims outright forgery—the consumer says that she never even signed a contract. But some electronic signature cases take a different form, with salespeople presenting only a portion of the contract on the tablet screen and asking homeowners to sign with their fingers, or misrepresenting what exactly they were signing altogether. In some cases, these signatures would be copied and applied to other parts of the contract without the homeowner’s consent.
In response to these varied forms of e-signature fraud, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), a legal advocacy organization, sent a letter to the CFPB last October asking the agency to issue guidance on e-signatures in the solar industry. The letter outlines the legal basis for a new regulation, citing the Truth in Lending Act, the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, and the federal E-Sign Act. Crucially, the E-Sign Act requires that consumers clearly demonstrate to salespeople that they are technologically literate and can easily access any documents they e-sign. The NCLC wants the CFPB to spell out how the E-Sign Act applies to solar loan companies.
“Solar bro” salesmen boasting lavish lifestyles have become ubiquitous on TikTok and Instagram.
As the NCLC tells it, the reason solar companies are able to get away with so many scams, simply put, is that nobody is telling them not to.
There are no federal laws telling salespeople that they must provide contracts in the consumer’s primary language. Nor are there laws against the use of iPads and e-signatures instead of paper contracts. These are regulations that consumer protection advocates and lawyers have been pushing for, and under the Biden administration, they looked like a possibility. Last year, the CFPB issued a report about the solar loan sector, detailing the kinds of scams consumers have encountered and encouraging others to submit complaints if they have been harmed.
“With sweltering heat across America this summer, many families are installing solar panels to save on energy costs to cool their home,” then-CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a press release. “The CFPB is closely scrutinizing solar lenders to make sure that Americans don’t get burned.”
But now, under the Trump administration, the likelihood that the CFPB would rein in these scammers seems close to zero, and the likelihood that everyday Americans will get burned has only gone up.
Alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency representatives, Russ Vought, the current director of the CFPB, has tried to gut the agency and fire most of its workers on multiple occasions, before being temporarily blocked by a federal judge. But even with staff intact, the agency has not written any new regulations since Trump took office and has dropped enforcement of several existing rules. In an enforcement priorities memo in April, acting CFPB chief legal officer Mark Paoletta wrote, “The Bureau’s primary consumer enforcement tools are its disclosure statutes.”
THE SOLAR INDUSTRY HAS BEEN RIFE with scammy tactics for years. In 2015, then-President Obama signed legislation that created the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) initiative. On the surface, the program sounds not just harmless, but beneficial: It helps homeowners finance green-energy projects like installing solar panels or energy-efficient windows with no money down. Homeowners pay for the projects through a surcharge attached to their property taxes. PACE attempted to get past a key hurdle to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in buildings: Many of the people with the least energy-efficient homes don’t have the money to upgrade them. Financing that can install energy-saving and money-saving improvements was thought to be a win-win.
But the program was quickly exploited by companies that wanted to make money off of unwitting homeowners. Aggressive salespeople went door-to-door, convincing homeowners to upgrade their homes and promising that they would only have to pay small amounts each month—around $100 in the case of Leonard McBean, one homeowner quoted in Vice. What the salespeople often didn’t include in their pitches is that, by signing their contract, homeowners were consenting to have liens placed on their houses. That means that the county could foreclose on the home for lack of payment, and liens also make the home more difficult to sell. In the case of McBean, the escrow payment attached to his mortgage ended up jumping up $400 a month.
Despite the fact that PACE was a federal program that worked through local tax systems, the salespeople pitching solar as part of it were not affiliated with the government. But that distinction could sometimes be difficult for consumers to parse—Obama’s name on the program and talk of property taxes gave some homeowners a sense of trust. But really, projects went through private-sector companies that contracted with on-the-ground salespeople.
The federal government and a number of states realized that PACE was becoming riddled with fraud, and worked to reel in scammy companies. In late 2024, Chopra’s CFPB finalized a rule that applies the same layers of protections to PACE loans that exist for residential mortgages. The rule ensures that PACE borrowers receive standard mortgage disclosures that allow them to compare the cost of the PACE loan with other financing options. The rule also places the burden of ensuring that the borrower can afford the loan on the lender, so borrowers aren’t set up to fail.
There are no laws telling solar salespeople that they must provide contracts in the consumer’s preferred language.
In the decade since PACE loans came onto the market, they’ve gradually become less and less common as local, state, and federal governments realized the extent of the program’s controversies. Los Angeles County, for one, ended their PACE loan program in 2020. But the solar sales business has continued to thrive and skyrocket in years since.
Dunivan sees today’s solar loans as just a different manifestation of the problems with PACE loans. With the end of many PACE programs, he said, “the solar industry had to pivot, and that’s when we started seeing what we see now, which is people going door-to-door saying, ‘Solar panels are great! It’s going to totally eliminate your electrical bill!’”
The solar industry is on an upward trajectory. That’s in no small part due to the federal government’s past efforts to stave off climate change and shift the country’s power grid toward renewable energy. Solar is now leading the push to renewables; in 2023, solar energy was 55 percent of new energy capacity added to the U.S. grid. In 2010, that number was just 4 percent.
Much of that has come from industrial solar arrays with battery storage, fueled by tax incentives from the federal government. But for two decades now, policymakers have realized that America has an enormous, mostly untapped resource that can help add fantastically massive amounts of renewable energy to the grid without needing acres of new space: the roofs of millions of houses, apartment complexes, and other buildings. That’s not to say they’ve done all they can to make it customer-friendly.
In 2005, the Energy Policy Act created a tax credit tied to residential solar installation. Homeowners who install solar can use the credit, often called the “Investment Tax Credit,” to reduce the taxes they owe by a percentage of the solar project’s cost. The tax credit was set to expire in 2024, but President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act renewed it through 2034. The exact size of the credit has varied over time, but it never exceeds 30 percent of the solar project’s cost. It also only reduces the amount of taxes homeowners owe—if a homeowner owes nothing to the federal government, they won’t receive any money from the credit.
Unsurprisingly, many solar salespeople misrepresent the benefits of the Investment Tax Credit to convince homeowners to take out a solar loan. In the CFPB’s 2024 issue spotlight on solar loans, they laid out the most common misrepresentations that salespeople have been using to dupe consumers. According to the CFPB, salespeople will sometimes try to convince homeowners that the tax credit is guaranteed—when in reality, it depends on the borrower’s income and tax liability. In fact, low-income homeowners are less likely to receive the credit. Despite this, solar salespeople will often present materials with the actual loan principal in a “small, light font” and put the “net system cost” (the loan amount minus the presumed 30 percent tax benefit) in a “large, bright font,” says the CFPB. Unless consumers read the fine print or footnotes, they may not understand that the “net system cost” is likely to be a major underestimate of the cost of their solar project.
The CFPB cited one homeowner’s experience from their consumer complaint database: “I believe that the sales representative knew that the tax credit is usually NOT cash received as he made me believe. But as I have since learned the tax credit is used to pay down any tax liability that I may owe at the end of the year. Had that been made clear to me I never would have agreed to the loan,” the complaint reads. “I am willing to pay the loan. I’m just not willing to pay the loan inclusive of the $19000.00 tax credit.”
IT TURNS OUT THAT HOME SOLAR is becoming increasingly common among lower-income homeowners. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that, in 2022, 45 percent of solar adopters had incomes below 120 percent of their area median income. And 23 percent of adopters were below 80 percent of the area’s median income. In 2010, the median income of households adopting solar was $140,000, but in 2022 that number was $117,000. The same study found that, while non-Hispanic white homeowners were still the likeliest racial demographic to adopt solar, “minority households collectively have a greater propensity to adopt” residential solar projects than their white counterparts.
Changing demographics means changing sales strategies. Or maybe the sales strategies are driving the changing demographics. Some of the most pernicious solar scams in recent years have targeted two vulnerable populations specifically: non-English speakers (or those who speak English as a second language) and the elderly.
Dunivan shared one particularly harrowing scam that targeted a Spanish-speaking family in South Florida. According to publicly available court documents, the family received a letter in the mail with the header “Programa Latino De Asistencia.” As Dunivan explained, “When you look at the letter, it had a very official-looking seal on it and it was written in Spanish.”
Court documents describe how the homeowner was swayed by the letter, believing it was official: “Plaintiff believed that the PLA solicitation was an official government program because of its name and the official-looking seal appearing on the correspondence,” the document reads.
photovs Getty Images/iStockphoto
Contractors have been known to stop work, leaving homeowners with nonfunctional solar panels and a hefty loan.
Dunivan recounted the rest of the letter, which told the family that not only would the solar panels be free, but they would actually receive a rebate. When the family called the number on the letter, a solar salesperson signed them up for a $60,000 loan with financing through GoodLeap, while assuring them that it was just in furtherance of the program mentioned in the letter. After six months, GoodLeap contacted the homeowner to begin collecting payments and the family realized that they had unwittingly signed up for a loan, and they sought legal relief. A representative from GoodLeap said that the company cannot comment on ongoing litigation.
“It turned into two years’ worth of litigation, which ultimately sent them over to arbitration,” Dunivan said, referring to a legal process that often favors corporations over consumers. When cases are sent to arbitration, as is mandated in so many solar loan contracts, there is no discovery process, no right of appeal, no rules of evidence, and no rules of civil procedure, and the arbitrators are often handpicked by the corporations. “Even with that set of facts, that family is still forced to jump through the hoops and gets no real relief other than being sent to arbitration.”
The CFPB noted this targeting of Spanish speakers in their issue spotlight, citing a Univision report that some solar salespeople conduct sales pitches in clients’ preferred languages, yet provide the solar purchasing contract only in English. This means that homeowners could hear an excellent sales pitch in Spanish, and then sign a completely different contract in English, like what happened to Dunivan’s clients.
Octavio Cardona-Loya II, a lawyer who has represented victims of solar scams in Southern California, notes that non-English-speaking homeowners are often easy targets for scams. “When you’re dealing with older, non-English-speaking, lower-income clientele, depending on where it’s happening, there may be less of a chance of them actually being able to access attorneys or legal assistance that would be able to deal with it,” he said. Even if they are able to obtain legal assistance, as in the case of Dunivan’s clients, they can be embroiled in a long and expensive process, and may not ever recoup the money they lost.
There are no laws telling solar salespeople that they must provide contracts in the consumer’s preferred language, which Dunivan sees as a major problem. He also would like to see a regulation that requires solar financing companies to determine whether homeowners can actually afford loans before they take them out, much like the “ability to pay” rule in place for mortgages.
That policy recommendation is echoed by Margot Saunders of the NCLC: “That’s what we are pushing for,” she said. “For the CFPB to issue a guidance saying, ‘These programs are governed by the requirements of the federal law that require lending only based on the ability to afford payments.’”
Saunders and the NCLC are also fighting to get rid of the mandatory arbitration clauses that are in so many solar contracts. She believes that arbitration makes it much harder for consumers to win back enough money to cover their losses and even to pay their legal fees. Other advocates agree that stopping mandatory arbitration would help consumers, like Dunivan’s Spanish-speaking clients, have a better chance at legal recourse.
WHEN TRUMP WON THE PRESIDENCY and, three months later, fired Chopra from his role at the CFPB, advocates’ hopes that the federal government might regulate solar were stamped out. According to Saunders, the solar industry is “right at that critical point where the advocates—us, other national groups—were just bringing the problems to the attention of the federal government and asking them to try to address it.”
She suspects that the CFPB was close to intervening. “This is hearsay, I can’t prove this, but I’m assuming based on the questions that [the CFPB was] asking us, and so on, they were in the process of seeing what they could do.”
Without rulemaking from the federal government, companies insist they have things covered. When asked about the court cases GoodLeap has been involved in and measures they take to prevent scams, a spokesperson for the company said that it has implemented a number of steps to protect consumers. That includes a product called Recheck, “which tracks salespeople’s adherence to compliance and consumer satisfaction,” the use of facial recognition technology to validate customer identification, and a requirement that homeowners record a video before installation to prove that they understand the terms of their agreement. But companies regulating themselves has never been their strong suit.
There’s some hope that states might be able to take up the cause and fill in the gaps. In California, the lawyers at HERA are pushing for a bill that would protect California consumers from any sort of home sales scams, not just solar. If passed, the bill, SB 784, would require lenders to call consumers and confirm the details of their contracts before signing, mandate that contracts clearly disclose all hidden fees, give consumers access to all of their account information, extend the right-to-cancel period, and ensure that loan repayments don’t start until the home improvement is operational. Lenders are putting up a strong fight against the bill, said Natasha Blazer, an attorney at HERA, but advocates are hopeful that it will receive support from a broad coalition of lawmakers.
“What we really want is to make it easier for people to not have to sue,” said Blazer about HERA’s policy efforts. That’s what strong policy should do, after all: prevent the problems from happening in the first place. “We are trying to give consumers who are the most vulnerable in these transactions even a foothold of power,” she said.
