The Internet Crime Complaint Center has received many complaints from victims of payday loan telephone collection scams. Callers claim the victim is delinquent in a payday loan and must repay the loan to avoid legal consequences. The callers purport to be representatives of the FBI, Federal Legislative Department, various law firms, or other legitimate-sounding agencies. Along with not paying follow the tips provided in the article.

According to complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau, victims across the country have lost a total estimated quarter million dollars to advance fee loan scams this spring. Advance fee loan scams target individuals and small business owners who are desperate to get a loan and often take the victim for thousands of dollars.

loans for car titles are the latest form of extremely expensive high risk credit targeting cash-strapped consumers. Title loans for up to half the value of the consumer's car cost ten times more than it would to get an auto loan to finance the purchase of the same car.

Payday loans are notoriously bad deals for consumers, providing short-term fixes to financial dilemmas at an extremely high cost. Con artists are finding ways of making them even worse.

These days, fraudsters targeting consumers who are down on their luck and desperate for money are providing another reason for consumers to avoid the temptation of a payday loan. The growing popularity of online loans has attracted scam artists who are eager to prey on these vulnerable consumers.

In a typical payday loan scam, the victim, who may or may not have ever actually applied for or taken out a loan, receives a call or email demanding that they pay back an overdue debt. Because of porous information-sharing practices, consumer's personal information often finds its way into the hands of fraudsters, making it easy for them to recite the consumer's personal and confidential information.

The scam artist may threaten the consumer with immediate arrest if he or she does not pay right away. This is a clear giveaway that it's a scam, but it also causes people to act irrationally out of fear. Scammers have been known to make dozens of such threatening phone calls to victims' homes or places of work in order to extract funds. Victims are often accused of perpetrating check fraud, forgery or money laundering to scare them into paying up immediately, when in fact no money is owed.

Consumers shopping for an online payday loan should be aware that even legitimate-looking Web sites could in fact be fronts for scammers. Some “red flags” of a possible scam loan Web site include:

   Requests to pay upfront before receiving a loan
   Payment is requested via wire transfer
   Payday loan Web sites that lack working phone numbers or mailing addresses
   The payday lending company is based overseas
   Loan packages that sounds “too good to be true”

Even legitimate payday loans, whether acquired online or in person, are already notorious for outrageously high interest rates. There costs are often hidden in fine print or outright lied about. The Federal Trade Commission recently sued several payday loan companies for “lying about interest rates, requiring borrowers to let the company take money out of their bank account automatically and threatened to sue borrowers or have them arrested for non-payment.”

Payday loans should be a last resort for cash-strapped consumers. They may solve financial issues in the short term, but paying it back will put you further into debt. For example, a recent survey of online payday lenders by the Consumer Federation of America found that the typical cost of a two-week $500 loan is $125, or a whopping 652 percent APR.

I received at least 16+ calls from these people on 01/17 and 01/18.  I wouldn't answer the call with 'hello' but 'who is this and what do you want?'.  Of course, I couldn't understand a word they said because they are foreign.  The last call I received on 01/18 I told the man in no uncertain terms to stop calling me, I didn't know what he wanted but he'd better take my number off his list.  So far have not received any more calls and this is 01/20.  I also received calls from other phone numbers.  These people need to be stopped somehow.