Suicide, Fraud and Phillips Consulting: The Story Of West Africa's Chinese Loan Shark Mafia
For years, a shadowy Chinese loan shark syndicate has torn a trail of havoc across weakly regulated West African jurisdictions. Finally, we get to see exactly who is behind the curtain.

David Hundeyin
May 30
150
45

One early morning in January 2022, my phone lit up with a familiar caller ID. My good friend Kenneth Bardi was not a regular caller, but we had a great relationship from our time as colleagues on The Other News at Channels Television. Life had taken us on different paths since we last saw each other in 2019, and I was curious to know - what was he up to these days? How was the wife? Any big news? Travel plans? Another baby? A career move?

He didn’t seem to hear any of my excited questions.

“Hello David, I need to talk to you,” he said in the unmistakable heavy voice of a man with something on his mind. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“Uh…OK sure. I’m listening.”

“Have you heard of an app called Sokoloan?”

“Um…yeah I think I’ve seen people talk about it on Twitter. It’s one of those loan app things that send terrible messages to your contacts if you take out a loan and default isn’t it?”


“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me…?”

“Yes. It’s a long story.”

Over the next 5 minutes, I heard a story that hit me like a punch to the kidney. Kenneth you see, is a TV producer and showrunner who has worked with Channels Television, OSMI, Multichoice and many other frontline Nigerian broadcast organisations. His productions credits include The Other News, Star Football Super Fans and OSMI’s 2014 FIFA World Cup broadcast, where he worked on-site in Brazil. By every Nigerian standard, he is a successful middle class professional and not at all who one would expect to be in the introduction of a story like this, but life had happened in unexpected ways.


Channels Television, December 2017 | R-L: Dan D’ Humorous, Toluwani Obayan, Kenneth Bardi, Julius Agwu, Binta Bhadmus, David Hundeyin

Shortly after his wife gave birth, complications relating to her delivery led to a hefty hospital bill. Despite the fact that he was busy with 2 concurrent productions for a media organisation that was not hurting for cash, he was being owed over 3 months worth of wages. Hard up and unwilling to put his wife and newborn through another ordeal after what they had already been through, he turned to what seemed like the only readily available option - a short term, high-interest loan from a loan app he found on the Google Play store called Sokoloan.

Like many others before him, he soon came to realise that the seemingly quick and available unsecured loan was not a useful financial instrument, but a trap. Having solved the problem at hand with the initial loan, he found himself taking out another loan shortly after repaying the first one, and then another and so on. This is a cycle that is sickeningly familiar to anyone that has struggled with payday loan debt.

A subsequent N50,000 loan rapidly ballooned into more N120,000 when he missed the payment deadline and had to roll it over. While trying to help out, his wife also got sucked into the same trap and soon the young couple found themselves owing hundreds of thousands of naira to Sokoloan and other loan apps. In August 2021, having missed another Sokoloan payment date, Kenneth’s wife woke up one morning to see her phone flooded with messages from acquaintances, friends and family. Apparently, they had all received a message about her like the one below.

Kenneth’s voice began to break as he recounted what happened next. Unable to come to terms with this scale of humiliation, his wife attempted to kill herself that afternoon. A few weeks later, Sokoloan repeated the trick and she attempted suicide again, this time coming very close to succeeding. Still the messages kept coming for months afterward and he saw his wife fall into a long-term depressive state. Not even the eventual clearing of their loan balance in January was enough to fix the damage that had been done.

“I just want you to help me tell my story,” he said, audibly fighting back the tears.

“I just want you to help me tell my story.”

Chinese Loan Sharks: A Quick Primer
Across South Asia and much of Africa, a perfect storm of weak regulation, growing populations and lack of easy access to consumer credit is fueling the international expansion of a loan shark cartel with origins in China. There are many theories about where exactly this cartel comes from, and whether it can indeed be called a cartel. Some theories link these loan sharks to the Chinese Triads. Others link them to Chinese banks. Some even consider loan sharking to be an inevitable by-product of China’s age-old private lending culture.

The only thing that seems to be agreed on across board is that the Chinese loan sharks currently tearing a trail of tears through large swathes of the Global South have their origins in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The city’s flagship daily newspaper, the South China Morning Post regularly covers stories about loan sharks that would raise eyebrows almost anywhere else. In Hong Kong? It’s just Tuesday.
Stories like Kenneth’s have long been widespread in countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India and Bangladesh, but they are now starting to become commonplace across Africa. Driven in part by the promise offered by a financially underserved, credit-hungry population across much of the continent and a state crackdown on loan sharks at home, China’s money lenders have launched a full-pronged assault on the world’s last remaining frontier continent.

According to Chinese government figures, over 41,000 arrests on suspicion of loan sharking have been made since it started a crackdown on the practise in 2019. In a single raid on a loan shark syndicate in the city of Lanzhou where 253 suspects were arrested, the gang was discovered to have over 1,300 illegal loan apps and websites under its control. With these digital platforms, it had issued illegal high-interest loans to over 390,000 people.

While the Chinese government is cracking down on illegal lenders, it is a different story on the African continent. In Nigeria for example, despite central bank regulation expressly forbidding issuance of consumer credit by any unlicensed entity, there continues to be evidence of a vast compliance gap by regulators, banks, payment processors and other stakeholders in the value chain that loan sharks exploit.

Source: https://westafricaweekly.substack.com/p/suicide-fraud-and-phillips-consulting?s=08

cc: Lalasticlala Mynd44 naijacutee dominique

Another interesting expose from David Hundeyin....

That his friends story get k-leg.

This post is just exaggeration of reality.
What we should focus on as Nigerians, is how people like the AGF can give low interest loans from their multi billion Naira loots. Imagine all 36 state governors deputies past and present, all senators, all reps, all ministers, AGFs, and more coming together to form a mega loan company. Nigeria as a nation or Nigerians will never need foreign lenders.

AJOBI77:
cc: Lalasticlala Mynd44

This thread is front page worthy. Even Chinese Government are clamping down on those loan Shacks. But they are comfortably doing business illegally in Nigeria.

shortIGBOman:


This thread is front page worthy. Even Chinese Government are clamping down on those loan Shacks. But they are comfortably doing business illegally in Nigeria.

That is the pity state of this country. Anything goes for nothing