Abhitesh
A series of instant loan applications, some of which have ties to China, have been orchestrating an extortion scheme in an effort to defraud and humiliate borrowers in India and fourteen other Asian, African, and Latin American countries. Able to be exploited and threatened, the blackmails have caused at least sixty individuals to commit suicide.
Those who committed suicide as a result of harassment from these applications were primarily in their twenties and thirties. Among those who perished were four adolescents, an award-winning musician, a firefighter, a young mother, the father of two daughters, a grandfather, and grandson.
Bhoomi Sinhaa took loans of about ₹20 lakh
Mumbai-based property lawyer and a widow living with her daughter, Bhoomi Sinhaa borrowed around ₹47,000 from various loan apps in 2021 as she waited for some work expenses to come through. While the money arrived almost instantly, a lot of it got deducted in charges. About a week later, she was required to repay however, her expenses hadn’t been paid. So, she ended up taking a loan from another app.
The debt and interest kept spiralling until Sinhaa owed about ₹20 lakhs to loan apps.
Sinhaa reeled from threats and psychological torture for months. She began receiving calls from recovery agents as debt mounted.
The calls were nasty and slammed Sinhaa with insults and abuses. Sinhaa, even after paying the loan, was accused of lying as she received over 200 calls per day.
Call centre agents didn’t stop there. The abuse escalated, they knew where she lived and they sent her a corpse’s pictures as a warning. Not just that, they also threatened to message her contact list comprising 486 numbers and dubbed her a ‘thief’ and a ‘prostitute’. They even threatened to tarnish her daughter’s reputation. Sinhaa then borrowed money from family, friends and several other apps — 69 in totality. Even after she paid all the debt, Asan Loan in particular did not stop calling her. They sent a badly photoshopped, naked pornographic picture of hers to all of Sinhaa’s contacts. The picture was sent to lawyers, the elderly, neighbours, architects, government officials and several others who would never look at her the same.
24-year-old civil servant who took her life
Kirni Mounika, a 24-year-old government worker, had taken money from 55 different loan apps. A ₹10,000 loan turned into more than three times that amount. She had paid back more than ₹3,000,000 when Mounika killed her.
Loan apps started to bother her, threaten her, and message her friends.
Mounika had a job with the government, but no one else at her school did. Mounika did what she always did when she went to work the day she killed herself three years ago. She had three brothers.
Her wealthy farmer father was willing to pay for her master’s degree in Australia. After she died, her father answered the phone and said, “They told us she has to pay. We told them she was dead.” Her father later told BBC, “We could have easily set up the money.”
How it works?
There are hundreds of apps that offer easy loans to people, but some of them are predatory. When users open these apps, the thieves take over their contacts, photos, and ID cards, which they then use to demand money from people who owe money.
According to a BBC story, if customers don’t pay back the loans on time, or sometimes even after they’ve paid, these apps send the information to call centers. The call centers then use their devices to threaten and harass people into paying back the loan.
The BBC worked with a debt collector to show how it worked. He talked to Vishal Chaurasia, a boss at Callflex Corporation, a company hired to get people to pay back their debts, because he had earned their trust.
Chaurasia said that when someone took out a loan, the apps gave Callflex Corporation access to their phone’s contacts. If the user didn’t pay back the loan, the company would start calling them and then their contacts. His workers could say anything to the clients as long as the loans were paid back, he said.
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“The customer pays because they feel bad about it.” Chaurasia said, “You’ll find at least one person on his contact list who can ruin his life.”
Possible links to China
Another call center worker who did loan collection for a different company told BBC that managers told workers to abuse and threaten people, but he said he never made such threats. “Everyone needs to keep up a good name with their family.” For the small price of 5,000 rupees, no one is going to hurt that reputation.
