Macías González said she was advised by the police to ignore the calls, get rid of her phone, destroy her SIM card, and brace herself for months of more harassment to her contacts until it would finally stop. According to Mexico City’s Citizen Council for Safety and Justice, a consumer watchdog group, 135 reports to local authorities have been filed against JoyCrédito for fraud and extortion. Her nightmare ended in late 2023 when the calls finally ceased, but her reputation was damaged: To this day, she said, some of her coworkers still humiliate her for the doctored photos and awful messages they received. Macías González is not the only one who has made complaints against the predatory loan apps, known in Latin America as montadeudas or gota a gota apps.
In other cases, scammers evade bans by changing their name or creating a look-alike app. According to data from Mexico City’s Citizen Council for Safety and Justice, 18 people formally filed a police report against Magicrédito. Magicrédito, a loan app based in the Escandón neighborhood in Mexico City, was taken off the Google Play store in 2021, but returned as Quikrédito with the same registered address as its predecessor. In Colombia, Google banned a spyware loan app called Unicop, only to see a copycat appear under the name UnicopPro. In Peru, a company called Alpacash-Préstamos en Perú was removed from the Google Play store (https://www.pipihosa.com/2023/11/22/sam-altman-to-return-as-openai-ceo-following-in-principle-agreement/) in 2020, only to reemerge in 2023 as Alpacash-préstamo. “These types of companies are in constant evolution,” a spokesperson for Peru’s SBS told Rest of World.
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How ineffective Google has been at enforcing its own policy. Of the 15 apps, 12 explicitly asked for access to either the camera roll or contacts in the Google Play store’s terms of services. Rest of World first raised the issue of the apps with Google Mexico on January 11, and followed up a week later with an email listing 15 instances of exploitative loan apps based in Mexico that explicitly violate the terms of the Play store. Two others specified full access only in external documents.
Although she had only downloaded six apps, police records showed her data ended up in about 150 apps. “We take this problem very seriously and we are committed to offering a safe platform for billions of Android users,” Ricardo Zamora López, head of communications for Google Mexico, told Rest of World in a statement. Google is aware of the issue. In Mexico, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company works alongside Mexico City’s Citizen Safety Bureau to closely monitor the apps due to the high volume of police reports against them. Regularly takes down predatory loan apps.