To respond to the “thousands of complaints against fraudulent applications”, the Treasury Commission of the Chamber of Deputies agreed on Tuesday to set up a working group with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to stop ‘debt-ridden’ companies.
In a working meeting, the president of this Commission, Luis Armando Melgar, explained that officials and legislators seek to design a regulation for “companies that offer loans through mobile applications, which have been called ‘montadeudadas´and they represent a new form of organized crime scam”.
In agreement with the various parliamentary groups, he said, they agreed on the “urgency of starting the debate on the issue of easy loan applications as soon as possible because it involves the handling of personal data.”
He indicated that the deputies warned that “organizations and people who take advantage of the intensive use of cell phones and offer personal loans are not contemplated in the law, therefore there is no criminalization of any kind.”
They reported that “there are thousands of complaints against fraudulent applications that operate asking for payments between 40 and 50 percent more than the debt acquired, they extort the creditor, steal personal information, display it and discredit it with their contacts and sometimes even spread intimate material”.
The deputy president of the Finance Commission remarked that “in the Chamber of Deputies we are open to studying these issues for an exhaustive analysis and, in the particular case of regulating the applications of ‘montadeudas’, it is a regulatory process rather than a budget one”, clarified.
Montadeudas: What are they and how do they operate?
- The companies are promoted through social networks and once they are contacted, hook their victims to whom they attribute unpayable debtsmany times for non-existent loans.
- A single company managed up to 19 applications mobile phone for make loans and to be able to commit extortion or improper charges.
- Several call center, better called “montadeudas”, they were coordinated from China to extort people.
- In these phone centers extortions were carried out after users, particularly women, applied for a loan through digital applications.
- By not paying the interest that was 40 or 50 percent more, the victims received threats and intimidation. His contacts were even harassed by the “debt riders.”
- The modus operandi of the “debt riders” was divided into three areas: recruitment, ordinary collection, and collection with a high degree of aggression and intimidation, the latter, referred to as “Area S0″.
- The collection of this loan is given with threats, since after having accessed your cell phone, through a app in which it was provided permission, information is used to intimidate in different ways: displaying the person and discrediting them with their contacts, spreading intimate material and hurting the person and their relatives.
- Some of the call centers operated in various states of the Republic, among which are: State of Mexico, Sinaloa, Puebla, Jalisco, Baja California, Nuevo León -particularly Monterrey, Hidalgo and Querétaro, as well as in Colombia.