BBC documentary takes viewers inside loan scam destroying lives across India

A phone notification buzzes and an sms pops up, ‘You’re approved for an instant loan for upto  Rs.3 Lakh. Click Here’. The user clicks on the link in need of money and as soon as they enter their details, the money is credited to their account. What the user doesn’t know is that they’re already trapped! The loan rendering company now has their personal images, user identification information and even contact list.

Days later, loan recovery agents begin with polite calls, which then leads to abuses and even sending morphed pictures of the borrower to their contacts. 

Poonam Agarwal, an investigative journalist with BBC, made a documentary exposing these call centres who are told to recover the amount. 

She shared, “This all started via a conversation with one of my sources who is a cyber expert and he was talking about this scam that is happening across India. He suggested I work on it When I read about it, so many suicides had happened due to this crime, that too back in 2021.”

“When I delved more into it I realised it's a massive scam with so many layers to it, with companies coming from China with Chinese investors. They started misusing the financial problems that people started facing post Covid. This is why we had to do this documentary as it had touched almost every household in one way or the other and we wanted to spread awareness about it,” added the journalist.

Rohan, who worked earlier for a call centre, helped her get a glimpse of these life-wrecking loan recovery agents. From abusing their parents, wives and children to even threatening to send their naked morphed pictures around, the hooliganism gets worse and worse. 

Agarwal shared, “The biggest challenge was to find an insider who could tell me what happens inside these call centres. It took me so long to find one since it is a lucrative business nobody wanted to share much information. But, finding Rohan was a big catch and then investigating into the call centres and perpetrators was also a big challenge.”

Digging in deeper, Agarwal found the parent source of these scams in India to be connected with a man with hidden identity named Li Xiang, who runs multiple Chinese loan firms which further outsource call centres in India.

There have been multiple cases of suicide, self-harm and even murder by innocent borrowers just to be able to repay the loan apps in various parts of India. Agarwal even went and met their families at their hometowns. 

What comes as a shocker is, this is not the story of a few small-scale loan apps in dingy corners but a brand like Navi too, which proudly has MS Dhoni as its brand ambassador and claims to not be like other loan apps.  

Agarwal concluded, “I am really overwhelmed with the response that we have got and people have found it so informative. Apart from that, union minister Rajeev Chandrsekhar held a meeting recently with MeitY and other fintech people. There are definitely some movements on this going around and I hope some concrete impact happens on this matter.”