Personal Loans Now warns the public about a new tactic that loan fee scammers are using

Personalloansnow.co.uk is an established and trusted firm offering access to a wide range of personal loans. In a brazen move, fraudsters cloned the website, calling their version Personal Loan Now instead of Personal Loans Now.

Unlike the reports that have been in the news lately, these scammers are not just contacting people and impersonating well-known, authorised lenders. In this case, they’ve gone a step further and created an identical copy of the website. The clone site is called personalloannow.co.uk and scammers use the company’s reputation to trick victims into applying for unsecured loans with them, handing over their sensitive personal and financial details.

“We started to get people calling us about a loan that they’d been approved for and paid for. We immediately launched our thorough incident-handling protocol and discovered both the fake website and the numbers they were calling from. All details were reported to the FCA. We have contained the effect of the scam by neutralizing the fake website,” says Ofer Valencio Akerman, Cyber Security Expert at Personal Loans Now.

“It is important to mention that our customers’ data has not been compromised. The scammers are working with data they got from email marketing companies and unlicensed brokers who want to leverage on their database. In this case, Personal loans now trusted reputation was used.”

Personal Loans Now wants to prevent people from becoming victims of this scam and others by raising awareness of the warning signals.

• You haven’t applied yet they claim to have approved your loan

• The caller has a thick foreign accent

• The scammer can become rude, aggressive or even threatening

• You are put under pressure to decide and pay them urgently

• They request a fee or charge to be paid prior to receiving the loan

• The method of payment is unusual: via Western Union, MoneyGram, buying mail orders or Apple iTunes gift cards etc.