Educated youths, WFH, daily targets: Sneak peek into world of loan app collection agents

“However, we found that the person did not even use a smartphone so there was no way he could make Whatsapp calls,” Pandey said. He added that based on further technical investigation, they found that the call had actually been made from Dharwad in Karnataka.

Based on this, a police team under supervision of Inspector General (IG) Yashasvi Yadav and Superintendent of Police (SP) Sanjay Shintre left for Dharwad where they arrested Ahmad Hussain (26), a class XII dropout. Shintre said, “When we questioned him, he informed us that he had been hired by one Suhail Sayyad (24), an MBA who resided around 150 kms away. We then arrested Sayyad and three others who worked under him. Two others fled from the spot.” The other three included Sayyad Athar (24) who had done an ITI course, Mohammad Qadri (22) who was in second year computer science and Muftiyaz Peerzade (21), who had done B Com, an officer said.
The five accused were placed under arrest and produced before the holiday court on Sunday where they were remanded to police custody for five days. In their initial probe, the police have found that the accused collected money from those who had taken loans from Happyloan app. The police suspect that the five accused are involved in collecting money on behalf of other such apps as well. The officer said that every morning Suhail Sayyad gave the login ID and password to others working under him to log into a website where data of callers was available. They set a daily target of collecting Rs 40,000 from defaulters. The officers said that in some cases they found that money was collected even from those who had merely downloaded the app and had not taken any loans.

An officer said that as per complaints forwarded to Maharashtra by the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCCRP), a total of 2,084 complaints pertaining to the state regarding loan apps had been forwarded to Maharashtra over the past two years. Of these, the cyber police found that 27 complainants were from around Mumbai.