Loan sharks

What are loan sharks?

Loan sharks are illegal lenders who often take advantage of people's financial vulnerabilities and may appear as a lifeline for those experiencing severe financial issues. If you miss payments, they can quickly become unfriendly or even aggressive. As the lender loaned you the money without being under the conduct rules from the Financial Conduct Authority, they cannot pursue legal action against you to recover the debt. This means that they only have illegal methods of recovering any debt from you.

If you need funds quickly, then you should consider the alternatives offered to you, these may range from loans from friends and family, using a pawn shop, selling items that you no longer need online or on social media / car-boot sales. It is usually worthwhile informing those who you have to pay, such as utility providers to see if they can help with a short repayment holiday.

 

Checking if they are legit

All lenders must register on the FCA Financial Services Register. Lenders registered to the FCA are all accountable to the law and thus can be dealt with safely. If the lender is not listed, then you should seriously consider the decision to borrow money from them.

 

If you are approached

If you are approached or even harassed into borrowing money you should inform the Police, however, if you feel uncomfortable going to the police then just let us know as many details as possible and we will pass the information on anonymously.

 

How we can help

Lestons can intervene and discuss options with you to resolve the matter, in essence you have two options – fight or pay.

If you choose to fight the loan shark then we strongly suggest you contact the Police and explain the situation.

We can, if instructed we can either try and negotiate directly with the loan shark in the hope that they will agree to give you some breathing room;

 

If you are on benefits, we can ask the DWP to give you an emergency loan to pay off the loan sharks, these third-party deductions are normally used to pay for debts such as council tax arrears, child maintenance etc but they may be able to help, they would need to see proof of the debt so that they know that it is to be used for that purpose;

We can approach charities on your behalf, explaining the situation to see if they will lend, or grant you the funds to pay the sharks off, and finally we could appoint one of our excellent third-party independent financial advisors who can look at your entire financial situation to try and maximise benfits claims and disposable income. This may allow you to pay off the sharks in one go.

 

Please note we make no commission from these referrals but do need clients to open a case so that we can prepare a financial brief for them. To gain our assistance you need to open a case, this is done by simply clicking on the link at the top of the page, you will then need to deposit a sum equal to one hour’s usage, upon receipt of these funds you will be assigned your personal caseworker who will telephone you to discuss the matter and make suggestions on how to proceed. We fully appreciate that paying for a service, whilst obviously in dire straits may seem counterproductive however we have a pro-bono fund which may be able to help towards the final bill at the end of the case, obviously grants from this fund are discretionary and limited but we will genuinely do our very best for you.

 

Please note your caseworker can only give generic advice, their role is to prepare your details for handling by our appointed financial advisor and to act as your point of contact, they will also issue you with your Password and PIN, these will be needed to log onto your client dashboard. From your dashboard you will be able to manage and view every aspect of your case, upload documents, images, files etc.