A 28-year-old Jogeshwari resident, who needed just a Rs 10,000 loan, had reportedly ended up borrowing Rs 40,000 and, on top of that, repaid nearly six times the amount. Curious to know how? Here¡¯s what happened.
The latest victim of loan recovery agents, the media firm executive filed a complaint against unidentified persons for harassment at the Meghwadi police. Just about five days after he applied for the loan in May, he started receiving calls from different mobile numbers blackmailing and threatening him to repay the amount, as per a report in Hindustan Times.
According to the police, the victim had reportedly applied for an online loan of Rs 10,000 from an app which claimed that he had three months to repay the debt.
However, he started receiving calls just five days later. ¡°I had granted the app access to my contacts as it was mandatory to receive the loan,¡± said the victim. The recovery agents threatened to share his morphed pictures with his family and relatives and forced him to repay the loan by applying for the amount from another app which charged him interest.
This way, he ended up taking Rs 30,000 more from five other loan apps. In total, he borrowed Rs 40,000 from six different loan apps, and ended up repaying Rs 2.5 lakh after he started receiving calls from 31 different mobile numbers every day.
¡°Like this, I was forced to repay ?2.5 lakh which I had to borrow from my friends and siblings,¡± added the victim, the report stated.
When the victim refused to pay any more, the agents sent his morphed photos to his friends and relatives and labelled him a rapist, ¡°It was so embarrassing. The police said they are trying to trace seven apps- Crazybee, Cash Advance, Dove Cash, TrackO, Onstream, Papa money, and Shuttle loan- as they operate from distant locations. They are operational on Google Playstore despite the RBI order asking for the removal of the app for violating banking norms,¡± he said.
A police officer reportedly added, ¡°The recovery agents even started harassing the complainant¡¯s relatives, parents, family members and office colleagues after the victim stopped answering their calls. We are tracking the 31 numbers from which the victim received harassment calls.¡±
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This case comes nearly a month after?a 23-year-old management graduate was arrested in Mumbai by Charkop police for duping investors of Rs 1.5 crore. He had been allegedly offering to invest people¡¯s money in cryptocurrency. The accused, Jagdish Ladi, had a BBA degree and has been trading online since the pandemic struck in 2020, the police said, as per a TOI report.?
Before this,?a?Rs 40 crore crypto fraud was detected in another city of Maharashtra, i.e. Nagpur, in February 2022.
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