Overview

Online loan scams typically involve impersonating financial institutions. Scammers use illegal methods such as "non-recourse loans," "non-recourse cash loan programs," or some form of non-securitized loans to attract businesses to use their loan services and gain profits.

If any of the following scenarios sound familiar, you may have fallen into a scam. You should report it immediately to avoid further losses.

First Contact

This type of scam is essentially passive. The victims are actively seeking funding sources for their company or themselves and directly contact the scammers after discovering their website through a search engine.

In some cases, scammers will directly contact businesses or individuals through email. It is currently unclear whether this information was leaked from public databases or obtained by scammers through dishonest means.

Scams are often based on facts.

Scammers are very cunning and often impersonate legitimate businesses. In some cases, their disguises are almost indistinguishable from real companies.

Victims will conduct various forms of investigation, and scammers will predict the actions that victims will take. Scammers are not only adept at using facts as the basis for scams to conceal victims (such as existing information about companies on the Internet), but also successful in evading investigation.

 Fake financial institutions or lenders

Scammers often create carefully designed fake websites claiming to be the official websites of existing legitimate financial institutions or local branches of legitimate companies.

Fake employees

Scammers impersonate employees of legitimate loan companies and contact victims through chat applications, emails, or instant messaging software on their websites.

Forged loan agreements

Loan agreements actually involve three parties: the victim, the actual lender, and individuals or company accounts used for money laundering. These loan agreements are very detailed and may even include personal information of the victims, making them appear more genuine and deceiving unsuspecting ordinary people.

Method

The core of the scam is a fake loan agreement, which stipulates that the borrower must pay a portion of the "handling fee" to the lender's bank before receiving the loan. These fees are supposed to be paid to the guarantor in the loan agreement (which is actually a third-party company used for money laundering). Once the victim pays the "handling fee", usually one of two things happens: either the scammer does not transfer any money to the victim, or the scammer asks the victim for more money with a new excuse. The latter situation often occurs repeatedly until the victim realizes they have been deceived.