OJK Calls Illegal Loaners Using Foreign Servers

Online loan (Photo: dock. Antara)

JAKARTA - The Financial Services Authority (OJK) revealed that most online loan actors (pinjol) are using servers abroad. This is data from the Ministry of Communication and Information (Kemenkominfo).

"This indicates a similarity of names of illegal loans that have been blocked and in a short time reappear with identities that have changed little (letter additions, reading marks, or figures)," said OJK Chief Executive of the Behavior Supervisory of Financial Services Business Actors, Education and Consumer Protection (PEPK) Friderica Widyasari Dewi quoting Antara.

Furthermore, added Friderica, these indications show a tendency that perpetrators carry out activities outside Indonesia and tend to use accounts abroad so as to avoid the reach of authorities in Indonesian territory.

OJK noted that from early January to the end of June this year, the financial authorities had received 8,213 complaints related to illegal loans. Illegal loan complaint is the largest of the total complaints of illegal financial activities of 8,633 complaints.

From January to June 2024, OJK has stopped or blocked 1,591 illegal loans. If accumulated from 2017, the total number of loan entities that have been blocked is 8,271 entities.

Illegal lending users are dominated by young adult age groups. Based on data held by the Illegal Financial Activity Eradication Task Force (Satgas PASTI), complaints related to illegal lending for the period January 1 to June 30, 2024 are dominated by the age range of 26 years to 35 years.

Overall, as of June 30, 2024, OJK has received 184,936 service requests through the Consumer Protection Portal Application (APPK), including 14,052 complaints with a settlement rate of 81.31 percent.

From these complaints, 5,020 came from the banking sector, 5,115 came from the financial technology (fintech) industry, 3,072 came from the financing company industry, 643 came from the insurance company industry, and the rest were services in the capital market sector and other non-bank financial industries (IKNB).

In the context of enforcing consumer protection provisions, OJK has imposed sanctions in the period January 1 to June 27, 2024 in the form of 156 written warning letters to 125 financial service business actors (PUJK), 3 orders to 3 PUJK, and 25 fines to 25 PUJK. In addition, in the same period, there were 137 PUJKs that compensated consumer losses for 659 complaints with a total loss of Rp100 billion.