PREDATORY payday loans information mill enticing homeless teenagers into debt to allow them to chase them for high-interest repayments.
The youth homelessness charity Centrepoint has warned that these loan sharks are leaving vulnerable young adults “frightened to death” after harassing these to pay up.
The Independent reports that certain 19-year-old with learning difficulties was bombarded with texts from the frim demanding he pay out lb200 once they lent him lb50.
The charity says the young man, from Bradford in Yorkshire, has a mental age of about 10 and was residing in a hostel when he came to them in May of this year.
Freda Dyson, who manages the Centrepoint base in Bradford, explained that they and her staff attempted to tackle the issue by confronting companies and alerting trading standards.
She said: “A tremendous amount of young people were able to get loans from unscrupulous companies.
“They were desperate. They might get a lb100 loan, but that might end up as an even bigger debt.
“We had young people getting inundated with telephone calls and texts from all of these companies: 'You will pay us', text after text after text. It could be a dozen each day.
“They counseled me under 20. Some were as young as 17. They were frightened to death.”
She also asserted the problem within the Yorkshire town had been worsened because some preying lenders allowed youngsters to get loans with respect to friends.
She added: “It's just greed, capitalising on the misery of others.”
Public anger in the behaviour of pay day loans companies within the last few years have resulted in governing bodies tightening rules in the industry.
However, interest in their professional services continues to be high with the industry providing 10 million loans to customers in 2013.
The new rules placed caps on interest rates and lending fees to try and ensure no customer was paying back a lot more than twice the original debt.