On February 15, fintech firm Dhani confirmed it had received multiple complaints of loan fraud where fraudsters availed micro loans using PAN cards of the victims. Speaking to CNBC-TV18, the company claimed it had taken immediate action in the matter. A spokesperson of Dhani said, “There have been a few cases where unscrupulous people have used other people’s PAN details to take loans through the fintech operation on the app.”
Dhani said in its statement that they are looking into all complaints, and before taking any steps, they are establishing if those cases were of identify theft or not. In case they found evidence of identity theft, they would inform the credit bureaus to rectify the records. It said, “We have integrated with G-defence, which is a global security platform to further re-verify each device against a specific customer and PAN through various data fields. This will stop these stray incidents of identity thefts.”
It further added the customer service team had been increased to 6,500 people to attend to the customer problems. An IVR has been started to solve such cases from the past immediately. In the statement, the company claimed 99.9 per cent of the 35 lakh small transaction finance loans that they gave in the past 12 months went to genuine people. “We will leave no stone unturned to mitigate any possibility of identity theft on our fintech platform,” it added.
Loan fraud at Dhani
On Tuesday, OpIndia reported that netizens had flagged a possible loan fraud happening at Dhani for months. Fraudsters have been allegedly using PAN information of unsuspected citizens to avail micro loans. As these fraudsters do not repay the loans, the pending loan amount in the majority of the cases went up to Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 from the base amount of Rs 1000 or Rs 2000.
Several victims OpIndia talked to claimed they had been running trying to get the issue rectified for months but could not get a concrete solution from the company. Though the company has claimed 99.9% of the loans went to genuine people, experts believe the number could be as high as everyone out six loans went to a fraudster.
During the investigation, OpIndia found there were several videos and tutorials with lakhs of views were available across social media platforms where fraudsters could learn how to avail recharge and cash rewards using fake PAN cards.
