Digital lending fraud! RBI says over 600 fake lending apps found

Digital lending fraud alert as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has now found that more than half of the 1,100 personal loan apps available are actually illegal.

Around 600 illegal loan apps were found among 1,100 unique Indian loan apps across 80 app stores, the central bank said in the latest report.

"As the number of lending apps grow, this trend would spike, since a user downloading a lending app cannot identify if the app is legitimate or not." The RBI also added that several copycat apps and websites will mushroom across the internet.

If a consumer uses such an app or website, it could collect the user’s personally identifiable information (PII), financial data and other sensitive details, which can then be used to compromise the user’s accounts, carry out phishing attacks and identity theft. Apart from affecting the user, it also damages the reputation of the company that the fake app is impersonating.

Most of these apps have keywords like 'quick loan', 'instant loan', etc, the RBI report mentioned.