Digital Loan Sharks: The Epidemic -By Osakwe Destiny

Digital Loan apps have taken over the internet! Have you noticed while playing games on your phone or using streaming services, there are pop up ads of these online loan apps persuading you to take a loan from them with ten to thirty percent interest. The ads come in form of skits, display ads that are plastered in your phone. Sometimes, these ads even redirect you to the Play store to download the apps.

The process of collecting loan from these apps include being asked your job description, inputting your phone number and that of your guarantor, full names, BVN, and granting permission for them to access your contacts. The amount of loan that could be granted on most of these apps ranges from 5,000naira to 500,000naira. The way these loan apps are advertised is quite enticing and convinces its audience to collect a loan whenever they’re low on cash or otherwise, broke. When you’re granted a loan, you’re given a time frame of 14 to 60 days to pay off your debt.

The downside to some of these digital sharks is that most of it are in fact, not registered by the appropriate association guiding loan affairs in Nigeria like the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and also not owned by Nigerians. Costumers data is mostly put to risk after granting access to these companies. They make the ads for these loan apps enticing and shiny without telling the costumers the length they would go through to obtain debts.

One appalling feature is how they subject their customers to experience character assassination, cyberbullying, physical abuse, public shaming, and extortion among others if it is past the time given to them to pay up. They sometimes, circulate the image of the customer to their contacts via WhatsApp to accuse them of theft, diagnosing them of HIV or even pronouncing them dead. There have been numerous reports of how loan sharks contact numbers linked to their debtors and bombard them with cryptic messages. For instance, the format of the messages they send goes thus:

“ATTENTION‼ This is to notify you that Mr. Anyanwu, phone: 080xxxxxxxx is a thief and a scammer. Do contact us if you have any information about him as soon as possible or we will be forced to take serious measures about him.”

Or even worse:

“ATTENTION! TREAT AS URGENT! This is to inform the public that Miss Orono has tested positive for HIV and has escaped from the hospital with the mindset of spreading it. If you have any information about her, contact us so as to apprehend her”.

Sometimes, they would call close relatives and also the guarantor to threaten them if they don’t provide information about the customer. One surprising thing about these messages is that they are sent by their workers who are in fact, barely adults which is imbibing violence culture into the lives of youths.

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) and the Central Bank and are working hand in hand to clamp down the operations of these firms and have frozen over 40 accounts and taken down 12 on the Google Playstore. Also the FCCPC have instructed telecommunication and mobile network providers to stop providing services to aid the operations of illegal loan apps.

This article is not to make a case for debtors but I am convinced there are better approaches these loan firms can take to obtain the debts.