You receive a letter from a loans company telling you that someone has applied for a loan in your name and the company believe that it wasn’t you, but someone impersonating you who tried to take out that loan.

Now, that sounds worrying and these things do happen, so the letter could be genuine.

However, scammers also use this approach to try to get your personal information – it’s their despicable form of Marketing.

The letter may tell a story about someone impersonating you and may give some accurate information about you – usually taken from the electoral register i.e. name and address.

The letter then goes on to say they will register you on the government CIFAS service to protect you against further such attempts and may include a separate letter telling you about the benefits of CIFAS.

See https://fightback.ninja/cifas-identity-protection-registration/ for further information on CIFAS.

The problem comes if the letter asks for you confidential details e.g. full name, date of birth, email address, full address etc.

Registering on CIFAS will need you to provide such information but do not give it to a company claiming they will register for you.

If you decide you want to register on CIFAS then do so yourself safely and do not give out confidential information to others without being totally sure it is safe to do so.

The letter from the loans company is likely just a scam – they get your information under the false guise of protecting you then will use that information to try to sell you their services or sell the data to other scammers

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

Likely Loans are a payday loan operation – part of Oakbrook Finance Ltd.

They typically charge 59.99% APR and to get people who will pay that they target those with poor credit ratings unable to get cheaper loans.

Internet reviews of Likely Loans seem split between those who love the quick access to funds e.g.

“Excellent service. Money within 24hrs and payments taken on regular dates”

and those who think the company are scammers and liars e.g.

“CON AVOID. WORST LOAN COMPANY EVER. RUINED MY CREDIT SCORE EVEN AFTER BEING A LOYAL PAY EXTRA CUSTOMER. HISTORY MEANS NOTHING ..AVOID”

Trustpilot shows 78% excellent reviews so they are pleasing some people.

Manoj Kumar Badale Is the longest serving director of Oakwood and is listed on 76 companies at Companies House – either active or dissolved companies. That’s quite a record and would worry some people.

Pay day loans may be a necessary evil for some people, but are better avoided if at all possible.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

The big banks and lenders give business loans but there are also a lot of small operations that claim to offer business loans and sometimes how they operate seems very dodgy.

A recent email from social-credit.co.uk tells us that says we are eligible for funding options.

“We help you gain access to rates as low as 4.9% for Unsecured loans and 2% for Secured Loans (indicative).”

“Gain access to funds in 24 hours”.

There is a website social-credit.co.uk which isn’t about loans but about getting your ‘social credit report’ on a subscription basis.

There used to be a UK company called Social Credit Report but it was opened and closed by Jason Jamie Roberts in 2016.

He is currently a director of multiple other companies.

The bottom of the email says Copyright loans2grow.co.uk so you might assume that is the actual lending company.

Loans2Grow is not a UK registered company.

There is a website loans2grow.co.uk which lists the name Intatrade Data Network Limited at the bottom of the home page.

This is not a UK registered company name.

At this point I gave up on trying to find a genuine company name – but I would certainly not want to have any financial dealings with a business that seems to hide behind aliases.

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There are lots of scammers offering fake loans at almost zero interest and for any reason.

People would have to be quite desperate to take any notice of these sort of obvious scam emails, but some do.

This latest one  is from moneystorelendings.xyz and ‘.xyz’ is not a domain name suffix that any legitimate lending institution would use, so obviously it’s a scam.

“We provide loans up to 500k without requiring good credit or collateral.”

Anyone would did lend to people with a poor credit rating and no collateral would be throwing their money away unless they had some way of guaranteeing the loans.

“we provide an Instant Approval in less than 30 seconds and funding the next day.”

The purpose of the email is to get you to click the link to ‘find out how much you qualify for’.

To get that answer you have to provide your financial details which the scammer can then sell to other criminals and rob your accounts.

Only ever consider loans from reputable financial institutions

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