How To Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts In Nigeria

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How To Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts In Nigeria: To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts again, remove the app safely and stop using it. See details below!

Many individuals have questioned, and continue to wonder, whether it is possible for someone, such as a client or borrower, to prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts after you have downloaded and used their services.

Can You Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Phone Contacts In Nigeria? I’ve got a lot of messages and inquiries both online and offline, and one of the most common ones is:

Can You Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Phone Contacts In Nigeria? I’ve decided to answer this subject in this essay after conducting substantial study and reading across the spectrum. Continue reading.

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To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts again, remove the app safely and stop using it.

To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts again, remove the app safely and stop using it. However, if you ever received a loan from them, your previous contacts will stay in their database.

The ability to get immediate credit with only a few clicks on a loan app or a digital lending platform, and especially without collateral or any kind of verification, has made these lending apps and online banks a popular choice among many people. It’s not only thrilling, but also revolutionary, to know that you may get fast cash of N50,000 or N100,000 in the corner of your room with just a few clicks on your phone, without having to go to a bank or send any physical correspondence.

Table of Contents

How To Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts In Nigeria

How Phone Contacts Became The Ultimate Collateral In Event Of Repayment Default By Borrowers

Can You Prevent Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts on Your Phone —

How Phone Contact Became The Ultimate Collateral In The Event Of Borrower Repayment Default

What borrowers, and indeed many Nigerians, did not realize was that the hundreds or thousands of contacts (as the case may be) secretly stored on their mobile phones or smart phones, whether Android or Apple, served as the ultimate collateral in the event of default on the various loans they had accessed.

In Nigeria, the numbers recorded on mobile phones and retrieved through loan applications were the lenders’ insurance, guarantees, and even collateral against any incapacity to repay or any type of payback default. In essence, borrowers’ reputations and dignity, or whatever remained of them, were to be utilized to guarantee and secure fast debt payback in the event of default.

See how a consumer named Isaac Ojo Obisesan was publicly humiliated by a lending app in Nigeria for failing to make his repayment on time. What could have been a better collateral for any digital loan platform than this? Isn’t this reason enough to force a defaulter to repay, if only to avoid the humiliation, embarrassment, and defamation that comes with a phony lending app going to such lengths to ensure its loan disbursement?

Stop your phone contacts from being accessed by loan apps.

Can You Really Prevent Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts on Your Phone?

Is it really possible to prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts after you’ve borrowed money?

The truth is that your contacts, which were “safely saved on your mobile phone” when you downloaded the loan app and secured the loan using the app platform, are “your collateral and guarantee for loan payback.” If you wish to apply for a loan but don’t have any contacts on your phone, rest certain that no lending app in Nigeria will accept your application.

So, to address the question asked in this post simply, you cannot prevent loan applications from accessing your phone contacts after you have borrowed money from them. Your phone contacts will be saved in the loan app’s external database against your name, BVN, and other profile details right away, even if you subsequently delete or uninstall the loan app. You’re at their mercy.

However, you may still prevent them from accessing your phone contacts and other information that you have given them permission to access. Simply scroll down to app permission and disable lending apps’ access to your contacts, sms, photo gallery, and storages on your phone. They won’t be able to contact your contacts or upload your photos any longer. They’d only have your phone number and would only have to deal with you.

It could be a business partner, a customer or client base, or even family members, loved ones, and group members, including hundreds of thousands of others, who a person/customer would not want to be humiliated or threatened in front of (due to loan default), but this was the ultimate card the loan apps in Nigeria counted on to get repaid if you defaulted. Their weapons include humiliation, slander, threats, and shaming, which the lending apps use against you and all of your valuable contacts, including family members, in order to get their debt repaid.

Your only assurance or weapon for preventing or stopping loan apps from accessing your phone contacts is to refuse to download such apps and to repay their loan. When you hit loan authorized on your phone, you already logged in and “approved your contacts for their database.”

Borrowers in Nigeria recount the humiliating experience of loan apps accessing their phone contact list after they defaulted.

Jane, who had defaulted on a loan, remarked, “It is not a wonderful experience.” To soothe herself after the lender called her phone connections, she responded in a mix of Pidgin and English, “Who no dey borrow?” Borrowing is a common occurrence in Nigeria. But instead of reaching out to my contacts, they should have concentrated on me paying their money.” While she was humiliated beyond her wildest dreams, the psychological impact was a sense of having nothing left to lose.

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Borrowers Recount Humiliating Ordeal From Loan Apps Accessing Their Contact List In Nigeria After Defaulting

To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts, follow these steps.

To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts again, remove the app safely and stop using it.

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” was the chorus as Cersei, the Queen Mother, was paraded around the fictitious town of King’s Landing as atonement for her “sins,” as Game of Thrones viewers will know. Hundreds or thousands of numbers on a person’s phone might be contacted in the same way, all in an attempt to embarrass a borrower into loan payback.

“I was broke at the time and under pressure to settle some things,” said Chidi, who borrowed N10,000 ($72) from three of these applications in mid-2021 but defaulted after the 2-week term. This resulted in a deluge of messages and phone calls, initially threatening him with retaliation, then to all of his phone contacts. When questioned, he recognized iCoin as one of the apps but couldn’t recall the others.

“Now that Christmas is over, if you know you borrowed money from any digital lending app, please go and pay it back. Because of you, I don’t want to receive any unnecessary communications. “Walahi, I’m going to carry them to your house,” Collins Nnabuife joked on his Facebook page, a depiction of the current reality many people face. Not only for individuals who have borrowed, but also for their phone contacts, who have received threatening texts despite never having been utilized as guarantors for the loan.

Google and Nigerian regulations are ignored by digital lending apps, which continue to blackmail borrowers.

Collins’ tweet was not unrelated to messages he had received, including one regarding a female acquaintance, which stated, among other things, that “Miss Jane Doe (real name withheld) with phone number: 00000000 is a thief and doubtful criminal now on the run with companys (sic) money.” She has been denying and ignoring calls from the company demanding payment.

“Please contact her as soon as you receive this notification, as photos of her will be released on social media sites today for a criminal act, and her BVN number will be blacklisted if she does not pay back today.” We’ll make her essential information public and report her as a scam.”

9Credit, NairaPlus, Lcredit, NewCredit, ncash, Kash Kash, iCoin, xCredit, Mint, and Soko Loan, which was recently fined N10 million following petitions from dissatisfied users, are some of the digital lending apps that have been reported to engage in similar crimes.

In Nigeria, How Are Loan Apps Flouting Nigeria’s Local Lending Laws And Google’s Policy On Finance Apps

How Loan Apps In Nigeria Are Flouting Google Policy On Finance Apps And Nigeria’s Local Lending Laws: Are They Doing Enough To Stop Loan Apps From Accessing Your Contacts?

While the majority of the apps indicate that the shortest loan term is 91 days, in order to ‘pass’ the Google Playstore criteria for the apps to be hosted, all of the apps, according to ‘victims,’ provide loans as short as seven days.

“We don’t allow apps that promote personal loans that require full repayment in 60 days or less from the moment the loan is issued,” Google says on a website about Financial Services app terms. It also warns, “We don’t accept apps that expose users to fraudulent or hazardous financial products and services.”

To prevent loan apps from accessing your phone contacts again, remove the app safely and stop using it.

Christmas is past; if you know you borrowed money via any loan app, please pay it back. Because of you, I don’t want to receive any unnecessary communications.

The minimum and maximum repayment periods, the maximum annual percentage rate, and other details are all required by digital lending apps, which most either misrepresent or omit. By making loans of only seven days, for example, these lenders are clearly violating a crucial Google rule that no tenor should be less than 60 days.

FairMoney Loan App is a loan shark, and I’ll never borrow money from them again — Single Mother

The quantity of money a person can borrow is influenced by their job and income. Furthermore, when a person borrows and repays a loan, they become eligible for a new (higher) loan.

Jane (described above) used this approach, borrowing N10,000 and repaying it so she could be eligible for a larger loan of N20,000, which she later defaulted on. She told BusinessDay that she was caring for a sick relative and had no one else to turn to for money on the day she obtained the first loan. Someone who had offered assistance had recommended an app called ‘Mint.’

To avoid defaulting on the loan after the one-week duration, she borrowed money from a friend and used it to pay the lending app, thereby qualifying her for a new loan. She would then take out a second loan, this time for N20,000, which she would repay the individual.

The second loan was the root of her humiliation, but she now acts indifferent after being sufficiently mortified.

“I’m no longer concerned.” “After all, they’ve already done the worst by sending texts to all of my connections,” Jane explained. “As they were sending messages to my connections, I told them that as a punishment, I would not compensate them until after the Christmas and New Year holidays.”

When questioned about Google’s reaction to conducts of lending apps hosted on the Playstore platform, a Google spokeswoman informed BusinessDay that the business has very rigorous regulations that regulate apps that are authorized on the Playstore platform.

“When we discover infractions, we take swift action, which may include removing the app from our platform.” Violations can be reported by going to the Google Play store’s menu and tapping the ‘Flag as inappropriate’ link. “When we get reports, we investigate and take decisive action,” Google stated.

Apart from violating Google Play’s conditions, the digital lending applications have also been accused of breaking Nigeria’s data privacy and cyber security laws.

Soko Loan, one of the loan applications, was fined N10 million by the NITDA after users complained that it violated their privacy and defamed them by reaching out to their phone connections.

“This action was taken after receiving a series of complaints against the company for unauthorised disclosures, failure to protect customers’ personal data, defamation of character, and failure to carry out the necessary due diligence as enshrined in the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation,” NITDA stated in August 2021.

The punishment imposed against Soko Loan has not discouraged other loan apps from engaging in similar tactics months later.

However, an August 2021 publication by Aluko & Oyebode, a law company, on the constitutionality of NITDA’s sanction on Soko loans showed the judgement was incorrect, citing certain comparable incidents.

What can be done, and who will reign in the excesses of the loan providers, whom many now refer to as unethical loan sharks, remains to be seen.

“In the case of ‘loan defaulters,’ whether their right to privacy has been violated is determined by the terms and circumstances they agreed to before the loan or facility was given out. “I see no reason why you should object if you allowed for the lender to have access to your contacts in the event of default,” said Olaitan Akinnubi, a Lagos-based lawyer.

“Where I believe the lenders go too far, in my opinion, is sending unsolicited messages to ‘innocent’ people with whom they have no business or relationship,” he stated. This, in my perspective, is a privacy infringement.”

A serial thief and fraudster,………, of…………… street, Lagos, (phone number), utilized you as an emergency contact and has absconded with the company’s money, according to a message provided to Akinnubi by Xcredit. Inform him that he must pay up right away or he will be arrested, and you will be implicated and sanctioned.

According to him, “associating me with an alleged ‘serial thief and fraudster’ and threatening to ‘implicate and penalize’ me constitutes harassment or what you may call cyber bullying.”

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced business loans for graduates at 5% interest (N5 million for individuals, N25 million for corporations).

He went on to say that under section 24 (1) (b) of the Cybercrimes Act 2015, “any person who knowingly or intentionally sends a message or other matter by means of computer systems or networks that he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will, or needless anxiety to another, or causes such a message to be sent: commits an offence under this Act

You can’t stop loan apps from accessing your phone contacts on LCredit, and the platform has a reputation for blackmailing borrowers.

Foluke Abosede Tijani (not real name), an LCredit client who lives and works in Lagos, recently complained that the now-famous digital lending app should cease blackmailing customers. She wants the government to make it illegal for lending apps to access your phone contacts.

Foluke, who just sent a message to us, claims he received a blackmail and threat message from the digital debt app today concerning a loan that is due in 24 hours.

The FCCPC has a list of requirements for digital lending activities.

The customer, who recently lost her job, is concerned about the threat posed by the LCredit digital lending platform and is urging the Nigerian government to force quick loan apps and platforms to be ethical and stop blackmailing borrowers, urging them to follow the rules and be fair to their customers who are going through difficult times.

She isn’t disputing the loan, but she claims it is past due and that she has recently lost her job, so she only has a few days to repay it.

Google restores, LCREDIT, and the Play Store

This borrower is pleading with the government to force loan applications like LCredit and others to cease blackmailing clients and from accessing and utilizing their phone connections against them.

Greetings, AXXXX FXXX, L CREDIT is the name of the company.

You’ve BREACHED OUR AGREEMENT, haven’t you? You have one hour to pay your PRINCIPAL AMOUNT or a REASONABLE PART PAYMENT, but if you don’t, THE COMPANY WILL:

1. CALL AND SEND THIS MESSAGE BELOW TO ALL OF YOUR CONTACTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND WITH YOUR PICTURE ATTACHED TO IT.

(This is to alert the general public that a serial loan defaulter, Foluke Abosede Tijani, with the phone number 08035579133, has promised never to pay “L CREDIT” their money and is on the run. Please keep your distance from him because he can’t be trusted with money or business.

Please call/WhatsApp this number 08068493746 or report to the nearest POLICE STATION if found.

2. SEND YOUR BVN TO THE CREDIT BUREAU FOR BLOCKING, BLACKLISTING, AUTO DEBITING, AND MARKING IT ON THE CRIMINAL RECORD. WHICH MEANS YOU WILL NEVER USE A BANK AGAIN IN NIGERIA.

3. SEND EMBASSY YOUR DETAILS/BVN. THEY WILL CONTINUE TO DENY YOU AND YOUR KIDS (BORN/UNBORN) VISAS TO TRAVEL OUTSIDE OF NIGERIA DUE TO YOUR CRIMINAL RECORD IN YOUR BVN AND FOR GOING AGAINST THE CREDIT BUREAU’S LOAN POLICY (CB).

PLEASE PAY YOUR PRINCIPAL NOW OR PAY A REASONABLE PART PAYMENT IMMEDIATELY THROUGH YOUR APP OR TO THE ACCOUNT DETAILS BELOW TO AVOID THOSE EMBARRASSMENTS…

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