An online lending app. (Photo: baochinhphu.vn) Searching the key word “Online lending” in Vietnamese on Google, there are morethan 49 million results in 0.6 seconds.
Meanwhile, key word “Online lending apps” has over 29 million results in 0.37seconds of searching.
Online lending apps provide trust-based loans in which mortgage assets are notrequired and borrowers just need to show personal documents. The loans will besent via banking accounts immediately.
Taking advantage of high money borrowing demand, black credit criminals havecreated tricks to trap borrowers with unofficial added fees and fake moneyexchange contracts.
This aims to force borrowers to take illegal actions. In many cases, the loansare not huge and the borrowing time is short but the interest rates arecut-throat, much higher than permitted legal rate.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Do Minh Phuong, deputy head of Serious CrimeDivision under Criminal Police Department, Ministry of Public Security, loansharks set up shadow businesses which provide online lending services on Zalo,Facebook to lure a large number of borrowers who are mostly small businessowners, low-income workers and adolescents.
Besides the money lending apps of credit institutions and financial companies,a lot of apps of unknown owner origin have been created. They often have nameschanged or information hided to avoid tracking by authorities.
When a customer installs a loan app and signs in personal information, someonewill contact to offer borrowing money and ask them to install other loan apps.These apps have the ability to access to message history, calls, social networkaccount information of the borrower for debt collection or for other illegalpurposes.
Most of borrowers are students or low-income workers who need to borrow a smallsum of money in a short time but do not want to sign in loan procedures atbanks or credit institutions.
Customers may not notice or ignore the information binding regulations oninterest rates, fees and fines, leading to being cheated with high interestrates of up to more than 300%. Some borrowers have to pay interest up to1,000-2,000% per year, Lieutenant Colonel Do Minh Phuong said.
Regarding debt collection activities, Phuong said from January 1, 2021, thedebt collection service business has been banned from operating to limit lawviolations.
However, some companies operate in the shadows under the name of security,legal advice, debt trading, debt collection authorisation companies, he said.
Borrowers have received phone calls from debt collectors who pretend to be lawprotection agencies to threaten or use personal information to offendborrowers.
In September 2022, a trans-national loan shark ring offering interest rates of2,000% per year with 58 criminals involved was busted.
The ring which was well organised and led by foreigners established atechnology company using 300 mobile phone apps and connecting with nearly 200pawnshops and financial lending companies.
They recruited hundreds of staff and created dozens of websites and socialnetwork groups to search for customers.
The ring was divided into small groups, often gathered at the border areas andwere ready to cross border every time they were discovered.
More than 160,000 people across the country were cheated on the online appswith total loans of 1.8 trillion VND.
Lieutenant General Tran Ngoc Ha, director of the Criminal Police Department,Ministry of Public Security, said black credit crimes are predicted to getcomplicated. The department has given consultations to local authorities tostiffen management on the work.
Criminals related to online lending apps with high interest rates andthreatening borrowers might be subjected to fines between 50 million VND and 200million VND or community sentence of up to three years if the illegal profitsmount to 30 million VND to under 100 million VND.
If the illegal profits are 100 million or more, the criminals will face chargesof 200 million VND to 1 billion VND or imprisonment of six months to threeyears.
The acts of threatening customers via calls, spreading false information,smearing borrowers who have not paid loans on time on social networks mightface criminal charges.
The Steering Committee on Crime Prevention and Control of HCM City recentlyproposed the Ministry of Public Security and the National Assembly considerstiffening penalties on loan lending with high interest rates.
Accordingly, the six-month to three-year imprisonment following currentCriminal Code is still a light penalty on black credit providers.
The committee also proposed the State Bank of Vietnam lift difficulties inaccessing to loans so that people in need of borrowing money legally no longerhave to seek for black credit services./.
VNA
