“Shopper” borrowers are gaining loans – Kommersant FM

A new type of fraudster has appeared in the banking market. They are called “shopper” borrowers. Such clients manage to simultaneously obtain loans from several financial institutions. This was noticed by the company ActiveBusinessConsult (ABK), a subsidiary of Sberbank. How is this possible? And why don’t banks block such clients? Aelita Kurmukova found out.

Fraudsters work through aggregator platforms and simultaneously submit loan applications to several financial institutions at once. And they get approval. This is despite the fact that banks have tightened the conditions for issuing loans.

But information about the money issued simply does not have time to reach the credit history bureau, said Evgenia Utkina, Deputy General Director of the ABK company, on the sidelines of the Leaders of Digital Development forum. She gave the example of a debtor who managed to take out a loan from 58 companies, which was a record. And, according to Utkina, the question will soon arise of what to do with such “shopper” borrowers.

But it is possible to identify these clients now, notes Vladimir Shikin, Deputy Director of Marketing of the National Credit History Bureau:

“When applying for a loan, the bank must request a credit report from the NBKI. This information immediately goes into your credit history. And the lender who uses this trigger system is able to “catch” suspicious lending activity when the borrower sends several applications in a short period of time – 5-15 minutes.

If we see information about the application in the credit report request immediately, then data on the funds issued can reach the bureau in up to three days.”

This is what the so-called shopper borrowers take advantage of. But the time gap is decreasing. And from January 1, information on issued loans will be received by the BKI not in three, but in two. And in the future, everything will move online, market participants assure. And issued loans will be visible in real time, just like the applications themselves are now.

In the meantime, financial institutions are busy with other things and are ready to take risks, notes Nikolai Pyatiizbyantsev, head of the anti-fraud department of one of the commercial banks:

“Since all banks are now in conditions of very fierce competition, the faster they issue loans, the more competitive they are. Banks are ready to suffer losses due to non-repayment of loans, but they issue loans very quickly.

The business perceives the proposal to take some kind of break very negatively, and therefore everyone is in a hurry. The faster the loan is issued, the more advantage you have in the market. That’s the problem.”

August was a record year for the number of loans issued. Against the background of the fall of the ruble and the rise of the key rate, Russians took almost 1 trillion rubles from banks, according to the Central Bank’s report on the development of the banking sector. They took out a mortgage more often, but the portfolio of consumer loans also grew significantly. Everyone, including marketplaces, tried to increase their client base, notes the founder of the fintech project “Money Forward” Pavel Guzhikov:

“Bigtech actively opened its MFOs. It’s much easier for them to get through this rescore, and, in fact, they don’t interact. That is, Yandex Market does not know what is happening at Ozon. Ozon does not understand how exactly it lends to Wildberries. And then scammers appear, who are now called “shoppers,” and exploit the situation very well.

These are small checks – up to 5 thousand rubles, they are easier to approve, they do not take up much space in the portfolio, but both banks and companies are ready to write them off. A fraudster, for example, after a week receives orders for 50 thousand rubles, does this every week, and then sells this product or somehow cheats on it.”

And we can already talk about tens of millions of rubles monthly in the form of such loans, adds Guzhikov. And, apparently, there will be no one to return them. Meanwhile, arrears are growing – in July alone, plus 566 billion rubles. And the total debt of Russian households, according to the Central Bank, by the beginning of August exceeded 32 trillion rubles.

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