They're a deeply sleazy company, along with lenders like PayDayUK.<p>They mass-cold-call people asking to "discuss their application for a loan", when those people haven't made an application.<p>They send threatening emails to folks saying that loan installments haven't been paid, when those people haven't taken out a loan.<p>Their tactics are basically bullying and fear.<p>(No, I haven't ever taken out a loan with either of these companies. Yes I have had to experience both of these annoyances. Yes, so have various other people I know).
I saw an advert for Wonga the other night and noticed the fine print >4000% APR and almost fell out of my chair. The article explains it though, and I'm less concerned for clueless borrowers running up 40k in a year :)
My friend's sole trading business has an 0845 number which goes straight to voicemail.<p>On day, he started to receive truly heartbreaking messages of financial hardship, people unable to pay medical bills for their parents, that kind of thing. People were literally crying on his voicemail.<p>It turned out that his number was just a few digits different from the new Wonga customer service line, and he had to change the number.
Maybe I'm not the right customer but I don't really see the value.<p>From the frontpage, they give me £265 today and expect me to pay £294.51 9 days later. With my credit card I get £265 and pay £265 anywhere between 1-30 days later.<p>Still confused? Is it only for people who can't get a £1000 line of credit?
I'm glad these guys didn't base their business idea on not primarily concentrating on customers who won't even have a chance to pay their loans from the beginning.<p>Here in Estonia, some entrepreneurs thought it was nice to mix up text-ing from cells and lending as far back as 2006 already (I think). Basically, you'll only need to provide your personal info with their site (name, Estonian version of SSN, bank account, telephone number), and then you'll be able to get a loan for as much as €1000 by just sending a sms. Most people lose their judgement after few shots of vodka, now imagine if you ran out of money after those two shots and the only thing needed to fix that was to send a SMS. Something that the provider won't be telling you, however, is that those loans come with high interests, sometimes as high as 1000% / year. As a result of that, quite a bunch of uneducated people have lost their homes due to this scheme that still is going on today in our unregulated economy. Seems as if they've now began tapping Swedish market, I wonder when is this going to happen in the U.S.<p>All in all, I was a text-book liberal before seeing some of the people dealing with results caused by this scheme, now I'm beginning to change my mind.<p>Also, there's a Wiki page about it: <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=et&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fet.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSMS-laen" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...</a>
typical pay day loan shark would charge "outrageous" 300%-1000%, yet they would loan pretty much to anybody, including very high-risk borrowers.<p>Wonga wants 4000% for loans to the top 30% applicants. Nice try.
This company is evil, but something I've always wanted to do is start a deposit bank where all the account decisions are made by algorithms. When a customer emails with a problem, an algorithm analayzes the message and makes the appropriate decision (refunding fees, chargeback, etc.) The amount of money saved by not having any customer service people would allow the outcomes to be more customer-favorable (sure, we'll refund that) without affecting profits.<p>(The prerequisite I'd need to get started with this is an archive of emails-to-the-bank with their outcome.)