After Sunny Leone's fake loan incident, several similar cases come to the fore: Report

Even celebrities can be duped. This has come to surface in the fake loan incident that involved actor Sunny Leone and digital lender Dhani. But one can safely assume that since not all of us are celebrities and hence, don’t get preferential treatment when it comes to redressing grievances relating to frauds, reported Inc42.

It’s unreasonable for several members of the public who face a similar problem. Although Leone’s problem was solved within a few hours by Dhani, others who claimed to be victims of the same scam are still awaiting a response. What lies at the heart of the issue is the ease with which wrong data is used to procure loans, Inc42 reported.

Let us dig deeper to see how digital loan scams and online frauds can be avoided. 

Here’s what happened with Sunny Leone.

The actor claimed that someone used her PAN digits to take a loan from IndiaBulls Securities (now Dhani Stocks). The loan amount was only ₹2,000, but Leone’s concern was that her data could be so easily stolen and misused, reported Inc 42.

Her tweet drew sharp reactions from several people, with many of them tweeting about loans given under their name by the same company. Some of them have been asking the lender to look into it.

These include journalist Aditya Kalra and former Flipkart AVP Karthik Srinivasan. Both these people tweeted about having unsolicited loans in their reports, whereas these loans were taken by someone else.

Kalra said that he only found out about the ‘loan’ linked to his credit history while he was undergoing the process of opening a bank account. His problem, just as Leone’s, was addressed quickly by the company, but everyone is not so lucky.

Srinivasan has been tracking several loan ‘customers’ on Twitter and it reveals dozens of people who have claimed to have been similarly targeted by unknown individuals who used their data to secure loans. It’s unclear how quickly their issue will be resolved, although Dhani stated that it’s seriously looking into the grievances seriously, reported Inc42.

The key point is that lending platforms have miserably failed in their duty to verify customers, known as KYC. In the case of loan apps, video KYC is the chosen mode to authenticate users and is mandated by the RBI. Not all platforms, however, have the same standard for video KYC.

RBI in May 2021 announced measures to expand the scope of video KYC for financial services, but these incidents indicate that although digital lending made procuring loans easier for individuals, things have become easier for scammers too.

In response to the spate of fake loans, a Dhani spokesperson said, “It has come to our notice about a few cases where unscrupulous people have used other people’s PAN and thus credentials from credit bureaus to take a loan through the Fintech operation on the app. We will leave no stone unturned to mitigate any possibility of identity theft on our fintech platform.”

The company says that it has partnered with a global security platform to re-verify each device against a specific customer and PAN through various data-fields to tackle such identity thefts and loans taken using such practises.