With his cell phone and documents, criminals took out 40 credits for $12 million in the name of their victim

A taxi driver is confined, along with his wife and children, in the municipality of Soacha, Cundinamarca, after the criminals who stole his cell phone and documents in the first days of January 2024 posed as him to request about 40 microloans with whom they managed to amass a small fortune.

Since then, The taxi driver and his family have been receiving death threats and intimidating calls to pay the 12 million pesos. that their robbers managed to gather, and the interests that have been generated over the days.

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“They impersonated me on digital lending platforms, what they can call drop by drop because of the way they charge, with threats and seven-day loans with 80% interest. Nowadays, life is uneasy for me after that,” he denounced, without revealing his identity, in an interview with the night eye.

With loans from one hundred thousand pesos, on at least 22 platforms, several of them managed by the feared ‘gota a gota’, the thieves obtained 12,178,000 pesosafter making at least forty requests in which his victim appears as responsible.

“I didn’t receive them, I didn’t even use them, or anything. What happens is that it doesn’t stop there, it’s the threats, death threats in which they name guerrilla groups, which, as they say, is nothing to play with, but I have nothing to do with that issue,” he insisted. in the hope that they will leave them alone.

The case is already in the hands of the authorities, but they continue to receive messages from the drop by drop, with a foreign accent, who have him “indebted, worried and scared because the threats arrive every day.”at all hours, at all times and there is a list of more than one hundred numbers that call, making payments and the majority are foreign numbers.”

He has not been the only one to fall into the trap of drop-by-drop lenders who, with the development of applications, work from their base of operations abroad. In July 2023, the case of a man made the news who, by simply downloading one of these applications to take a look at it, received 650 thousand pesos in his account from Nequi.

He tried to contact technical support to make the return, but the administrators informed him that he had to pay the interest which, after a couple of hours had passed, was the same value as the loan; That is, another 650 thousand, for a total of 1,300,000 pesos.

Liliana Zambrano, from the legal direction of legaltech and security expert, then explained to Infobae Colombia that “this is a new modality that they are using. They tell a person that they have assigned them and with their basic data they are making many of them install applications and, by doing so, they manage to kidnap their information. It becomes a coming and going because what the person does is, first, “Try to resolve your financial situation by returning the money, but then what they do is hack your information or your bank account.”

And he warned that “since mid-2023, these applications, also known as apps, have been identified that are telling them (those who need loans): install it (our app) and you will see the information. So what the person does is install the app and when he realizes he already has a mardware on your phone.”