Unending Circle of Online Loan Apps

My name is Setya Nurul Faizin. I work as a teacher in a language program school, located in Ponorogo, a small city in East Java. I'm not married yet I have 3 younger sisters whom I badly need to provide for their schools.

No more than three months ago, I had a difficult situation where I got my monthly pay late due to school condition and some amount in bills due. I made a wrong decision by borrowing easy money from online application.

For your information, these apps have been growing massively in Indonesia illegally (some are legal, but most are not). One instance is IDR 1,000,000 loan will be cashed out omly IDR 650,000 for only 7 days. So after receiving IDR 650,000 today, I had to payback IDR 1,000,000 the next 7 days.

The thing is, once your number is registered to one apps, at least 5 more other apps will contact you and offer their "product". In my case and circumstance, the financial condition was not getting better. So after 7 days, instead of closing my debt in one apps, I made another 2 loan applications in two apps just to close 1 debt. It got worse and worse everyweek and everyday.

As per March 7, I had at least 35 debts in 35 apps ranged between IDR 1,000,000-2,500,000 that the due are scattered everyday (2-5 apps are due everyday).

It is a trap. Because all these apps work together into luring its customers to loan more and more. In my case, and most cases, the money borrowed wasn't used for personal use, instead to pay the debts in other apps. So the accumulation of more or less IDR 45,000,000 (USD3,000) were their money circulating from one apps to another using my account, my name, my number. That's how "successful" they are in making people trapped forever.

I decided to stop the circle. I ignored all offering calls and text messages. I didn't borrow another dime. But I don't have the total money to pay all that amount.

And the worst part is, their debt collector work in a very cruel way. They threat to calls every single number in my contacts, coming to my workplace, to my parent house. Asking money from them. And basically killing my character in front of my contact numbers. It turns out, once you installed the apps, it can hack your phone and download everything: contact numbers, social media login info, everything.

I learned that there had been several suicide cases in Indonesia due to this. I don't want to give up to such stupidity that I made in the past but I meet a dead-end.

For every donations made here, I will make a face painting for the donator.