Inside the scramble to cut off Chinese loan apps

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Editor's note: It has been a month now since the Telangana police began a crackdown on short-term loan apps, following a number of suicides ostensibly due to harassment over loan recoveries. The action against these apps, mostly controlled by Chinese firms, led to several arrests of Chinese nationals as well as Indians working with those companies. We had written in depth in an earlier piece about how these apps operated their personal and payday loan business in India, and the fallout that their actions have on other fintech lenders. The matter is now being investigated by the Enforcement Directorate and the criminal investigation departments of various state police forces. The ongoing investigations have seen payment gateways and non-banking financial companies, or NBFCs, as well as Google, scramble to cut off Chinese lending apps at the authorities’ behest. The results throw up some fascinating details about the process of weeding out predatory and largely unregulated lending apps, as well as about some of the companies involved. Over a two-part series, we’ll take a very close look at both. The chase “We arrested about …