Loans On Your Cell Phone
Apparently the Finns have no patience. The budding instant-loan industry in Finland allows consumers to get loans in about five minutes by sending a text message from their mobile phone. But these loans come with exorbitant interest rates. Think payday loans, but optimized for the impulsive.
According to the NPR article:
[Finland's Consumer Ombudsman] has found that customers can get money transferred to their own bank accounts using another person's cell phone and national identification number. Planting-Visa says another big problem is that people simply don't realize what they're getting into.
Fast Credit Getting Faster [CL&P Blog]
(Photo: samwilkinson)
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Comments:
What a horrible idea. Those payday places are bad enough but having them on-demand via cellphone?
What if you needed a loan to pay back a payday loan place and all you had was a cell phone?
How is this different from cash advances on a credit card?
I'm living in Finland, and we have had quite a lot of conversations about these text message loans. Loans seems to be quite popular among persons under 30 years here and also in Sweden: some information from Sweden, in Swedish, sorry!.
I suppose that we do not have so much credit cards here, and that's one of the reasons to take a loan (even it's really expensive and stupid thing to do...)
wow what a horendously stupid idea...
This is almost as bad as having little plastic cards that you carry with you everywhere that you can use to take out loans for groceries and other purchases.
It would be nice to be able to get an instant loan via text message while I'm standing at the (insert cell provider) store upgrading my handset. What a country! Wait, I'm not in Finland.