No person shall engage in the business, for compensation, of selling checks, drafts, money orders, or other commercial paper serving the same purpose, or of receiving money as agent of an obligor for the purpose of paying bills, invoices, or accounts of such obligor, or acting as a prorater, nor shall any person, without direct compensation and not as an authorized agent for a utility company, accept money for the purpose of forwarding it to others in payment of utility bills, without first obtaining a license from the commissioner.
Cal. Fin. Code § 12200
Licensing
Applied in 5 court decisions — leading case Federal Trade Commission v. Leshin (2010)
Most recently applied in Nationwide Biweekly Admin., Inc. v. Superior Court of Alameda Cnty. (June 2018)
Amended by Stats. 1983, Ch. 660, Sec. 8.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.