Acodeco Warns there are Reports of Fraud: Beware of Credit Apps in Panama
The director of Acodeco pointed out that during the verification of documentation, many of these are falsified.
Ramón Abadi, General Administrator of Acodeco, warned that the institution has received a large number of complaints from clients whose credit history has been affected after their documentation was falsified on some digital platforms dedicated to microcredit. According to Abadi, complaints arise when customers search for a banking transaction and their credit history shows a loan they never requested. “When you make a complaint, the company (microcredit applications) then asks you to pay or file a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and they can also come to Acodeco with your credit history,” Abadi said on Julio Miller’s program on Kw Continente.
Abadi added that business owners have come forward to Acodeco and reported the matter “so that we can administratively sanction these companies.” “What happens is that when you go to see the documentation that authorized the loan, they have copies, often of the consumer’s ID, but they don’t have a signature or any other document to support it,” he explained. He explained that what these companies have are falsified documents such as the Social Security card or the payment receipt.
“It’s all a farce, and then they excuse themselves by saying that they were scammed and not you, but they’ve made you have a bad time because you haven’t been able to make your bank transaction and you’ve had to go before all these authorities to disassociate themselves from an issue that is their responsibility to do due diligence and verify that it really is the person and comply with the control mechanisms that they must have,” he said.
“Those people need to be sanctioned and removed from the market,” warned the Acodeco administrator. “This is a call to action for the Financial Companies entities of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI) and for the Superintendency of Banks. We are going to call them to account because we are going to put a stop to this kind of business that harms the Panamanian consumer,” he declared.
