BEJING: Women in China are sending naked photographs of themselves holding their ID cards to peer-to-peer lenders as collateral, Chinese state media have reported.
The phenomenon, which the Beijing Youth Daily said was taking place on a popular online peer-to-peer lender called Jiedaibao, is provoking alarm and sympathy on social media. It has also led to calls for women to protect themselves from predators who are reportedly blackmailing them with the nude photographs, sometimes demanding sexual services when the women cannot repay at interest rates that can be as high as 30% a week.
A call seeking comment to Jiedaibao, a leading company in China’s flourishing peerto-peer lending market, was not answered late on Wednesday.
Beijing Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League, said the practice was an “open secret.”
“An investigation by Beijing Youth Daily shows that in some money lending groups, female university students’ ‘naked holding’ has already become an open secret,” it wrote.
On Weibo, a person called Beijing Ninth Uncle said he was gathering evidence that women from many different walks of life, including farmers and even a former employee of Jiedaibao, as well as university students, were falling afoul of the lenders’ demands.
“With ‘naked holding’ they can get two to five times the amount of money, but when they can’t repay some have been threatened with publishing the photographs, and some lenders are even demanding the female students provide sexual services,” it wrote.
It described the case of a university student from Jiangsu, whom it gave the pseudonym of Lin Xiao. Her troubles began, it said, when she borrowed 500 renminbi ($75), from a lender in February to open an online store. At 30% interest on the one-week loan, she quickly needed more money to repay the debt, eventually borrowing 120,000 renminbi from 15 people, a sum that ballooned into 250,000 renminbi ($38,000) at the high interest rate.
{{/usCountry}}It described the case of a university student from Jiangsu, whom it gave the pseudonym of Lin Xiao. Her troubles began, it said, when she borrowed 500 renminbi ($75), from a lender in February to open an online store. At 30% interest on the one-week loan, she quickly needed more money to repay the debt, eventually borrowing 120,000 renminbi from 15 people, a sum that ballooned into 250,000 renminbi ($38,000) at the high interest rate.
{{/usCountry}}She remembered another borrower saying, “If you send a nude picture to the boss, he will lend you even more.” So the woman supplied a nude photograph of herself in exchange for a larger loan to try to escape her debt, the newspaper reported.