Beware Online Loan Sharks
26/03/09 23:19 Filed in: Personal
It’s no surprise that we offset the cost of hosting with advertising. Feel free to click anything that catches your eye by the way 
We run another site, Everything You Know Is A Lie and I figured it was about time we freshened up the advertisers. We use Trade Doubler as our advertising broker and things have been great. We did have a brief go at using Google Ads on our site. But the 3 month delay in payment, crap rates of return and frequent claims of ‘gaming the system’ were too much for us. So we dropped them like a stone.
I could go into the details, but the claimed ‘bogus’ IP’s traced back to Microsoft’s NAT in Reading. I digress.
What I wanted to talk about was one of the advertisers on Trade Doubler. A short term loan company called Wonga. Apart from the catchy name, something else stands out for me.
Have you noticed it yet. In the bottom right corner. The APR for a £200 loan for 5 days is.... 2,689% APR. I’ll spell that out for your TWO THOUSAND, SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE PERCENT!!
That is total daylight robbery. What is more, the APR is fixed at that rate, so a loan of £200 for 30 days will set you back £266.11. For those without calculators that’s £2.20 interest per day until the loan is paid off.
And I thought the worst rate I’d ever seen for a loan (on moneysupermarket.com) was 50% APR. How wrong can you be? Well, 2,639% wrong.... obviously.
We run another site, Everything You Know Is A Lie and I figured it was about time we freshened up the advertisers. We use Trade Doubler as our advertising broker and things have been great. We did have a brief go at using Google Ads on our site. But the 3 month delay in payment, crap rates of return and frequent claims of ‘gaming the system’ were too much for us. So we dropped them like a stone.
I could go into the details, but the claimed ‘bogus’ IP’s traced back to Microsoft’s NAT in Reading. I digress.
What I wanted to talk about was one of the advertisers on Trade Doubler. A short term loan company called Wonga. Apart from the catchy name, something else stands out for me.
Have you noticed it yet. In the bottom right corner. The APR for a £200 loan for 5 days is.... 2,689% APR. I’ll spell that out for your TWO THOUSAND, SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE PERCENT!!
That is total daylight robbery. What is more, the APR is fixed at that rate, so a loan of £200 for 30 days will set you back £266.11. For those without calculators that’s £2.20 interest per day until the loan is paid off.
And I thought the worst rate I’d ever seen for a loan (on moneysupermarket.com) was 50% APR. How wrong can you be? Well, 2,639% wrong.... obviously.
