Fraud Warning, Please Don't Become The Next Victim

Since the start of the year, we are currently seeing a massive rise in loan fraud. Please don't pay anyone money upfront for a loan. There are many factors for this, one being the withdrawal of credit facilities to those with bad credit. What we are planning on doing is updating this page with complaints from victims. This will enable people to see the scale of the problem.

How The Scam Works

1. Rogue cold callers (based in India) call members of the public pretending to be brands like ours. They use UK Internet numbers to give the appearance of being in the UK.
2. They tell the victims that they have been approved for a loan.
3. They then convince the member of the public that they need to prove they are real by paying their first instalment upfront. They say this isn’t an admin fee! They ask for this to be paid via Ukash vouchers.
4. Victim pays the money and awaits a loan that never comes. Sometimes the fraudsters try to get a few quid more by asking for a transfer fee, vat etc. Eventually it dawns on the victim not to send anymore and the fraudsters stop answering the phone and disappear.
5. The victim then comes to our contact us page for our phone number and give us abuse, make complaints to the OFT and the FCA and claim that we have stolen their money.

Key Points

• Quick Loans and other brands on our network have not and will never cold call anyone. Our customers come to us, we don’t go to them.
• We have never charged any upfront fees.
• We are seeing around 15 complaints a day across our brands alone. At an average loss of around £70, we are seeing victims lose around £1200 - £1300’s a day. These are just the people that contact us.
• The highest we have seen is £750 lost by a single individual.
• Rolling out our market share across the market. Assuming they are using the names of other brands. We estimate that over £50,000 a day is being lost to these scammers.
• We estimate that not all of the victims actually contact us due the being embarrassed. The ones that do may only be the tip of the iceberg.
• Victims only come to our site for the first time after they have already become victims. Our warnings on our site are therefore useless in preventing most fraud.
• The FCA report on their websites that these cloning scams are happening to other brands. Fraud is now out of control and nobody appears to be publishing warnings in the media.
• We do not in any way blame the FCA for any of this. They are as desperate to stop this as we are and we are confident they are doing what they can. They can’t be held responsible for the actions of fraudsters anymore than we can.
• Quick Loans requested that MP’s who campaigned for the Payday Loan cap to issue a warning. MP’s like Stella Creasy have ignored us and our emails and have not issued any public warnings on the issue. Nor have they had the decency to even reply to us. They seem to have had their 15 minutes of fame and no longer bothered about victims – if they actually ever were.
• MoneySavingExpert.com forum deleted our posts of fraud warnings
• Yes this kind of fraud has been happening since 2009, however since the start of the year the rate at which we are hearing of complaints is now frightening.  

Well today we have just about had enough. Others may want the consequences of their actions from reaching the public but we are now updating this page with every email complaint we receive. It’s important that members of the public now see the real world fallout from the actions of those that called for caps.