Two officials of an “instant loan” application company detained for harassing clients

Bangalore: The Karnataka Police CID on Thursday arrested two prominent officials, including the chief financial officer, of an “instant mobile loan app” company who allegedly harassed their clients for non-payment of loans.

According to the CID, they raided four companies – Mad Elephant Technologies Private Ltd, Borayanxy Technologies Private Ltd, Profitise Private Ltd and Wizzpro Solutions Private Ltd after receiving complaints of “harassment” from clients who were charged a huge 36% interest. loan in the amount of Rs 9,000 to Rs 15,000 for a period of one week or two weeks.

CID said it seized laptops, cell phones and other documents from the companies. Significantly, all of these apps appear to be built on a single SDK, which is believed to originate from China.

CID discovered that these app companies obtained sensitive data, such as contacts and photographs, from clients’ cell phones, and used it to lobby them to secure repayment of loans.

He also said that the modus operandi of these companies was quite similar – they hacked their defaults’ cellphones and created a WhatsApp group made up of relatives and friends of customers and defamed customers by sharing their photographs with tags such as “Chor”, “failing”, “fraud” and “420”.

On top of that, these company agents used to force these defaulters to re-take out loans from other similar mobile lending apps and thus lure them into a debt trap, CID said.

A CID officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IANS that most of these apps are said to have been developed with the help of Chinese funding and that each of these companies has developed several apps to cash out. loans.

The officer added that loan collectors have also used fake SIM cards to harass delinquent customers. “Most of these applications are cloud-based systems that are accessible and monitored by neighboring countries (China),” the officer said.

The CID statement also revealed that the harassment was to some extent if the defaulter is female, the debt collector didn’t even hesitate to solicit sexual favors. “In some cases, recovery officers had even threatened physical and sexual assault,” he said.

CID called on people to come forward to file complaints against such an instant loan through mobile phone apps.