There is a chilling new trend lurking in gloomy corners of Reddit that has largely gone unnoticed but is putting thousands of vulnerable women under the control of sexual predators. Reddit loans are becoming increasingly popular for anyone in need of a quick injection of cash, be it £40 to fill up the car, feed the kids, or pay an overdue bill, but who either cannot get help from any reputable source or have a poor credit score.
Unable to pay the £40 back within days, thousands of women in Britain alone are being bullied into paying off their debt with sexual favours to illegal lenders or loan sharks who charge extortionate interest rates and threaten to make their lives hell. Ellie Flynn went undercover as a single mother for a new Channel 4 episode of Hunting The Debt Predators: Dispatches to investigate a lesser-known consequence of the cost-of-living crisis that is being exploited by thousands of Reddit users, pushing everyday people into sex work.
Ellie discovered huge subreddits with thousands of members and noticed that public threads would swiftly move to private messages. ‘I wondered what was happening on them, and I saw a couple of replies that seemed to suggest that there could be something sexual going on or being proposed,’ she tells Metro. ‘I described myself as a single mum, just needing a bit of extra cash for petrol and food, and immediately dozens of replies came in from people who were willing to offer me the money or loan me the money if I was prepared to do something sexual in return.’
Ellie says the messages were a mixed bag; some were alarmingly explicit from the get-go, while others appeared friendly at first before their motivations soon became apparent. ‘They would make it seem like they were going to lend you the money and potentially could help, so you would start a conversation with them, and then they would start asking for things to verify you are who you say you are – they’d ask for a selfie or a photo where you’re holding a certain number of fingers up. Obviously, the people who are lending money, if they are legitimate lenders, don’t know who they’re lending to, so we went through that process with a few people, but ultimately everybody that we spoke to in the end ended up being sexual.’
In the film, Ellie engages with several of these illegal lenders. She disguises herself slightly in a wig when one asks her to take photos of herself. He soon confirms he is naked and asks if she could be the same. She talks on the phone to a loan shark who urges her to open multiple bank accounts, which can often be a means for criminal organisations to launder money. She even comes face-to-face with one of these illegal lenders, who shows zero remorse for exploiting vulnerable people and making their lives infinitely harder.
‘Meeting him was a sobering experience,’ she says. ‘He was describing it as helping people out and providing a service that banks provide, but to people who can’t access that. But I just think fundamentally, anyone who is willing to take advantage of people who are suffering during the cost-of-living crisis and who can’t make ends meet at the moment, and is willing to profit from that, is just exploitative. That was what it felt like it was.’
Speaking to the victims of Reddit loans was a profoundly upsetting experience, too. Ellie talks to two women who were sexually harassed by lenders, falling into the trap of being unable to pay back a loan and feeling like they had no other option than to clear their debt with sexual favours, usually by sending explicit pictures to strangers. Among them was one woman who worked in the financial sector and needed a completely clean credit history to keep her job. She was terrified that by taking out a regulated loan and then being unable to repay it, she could be fired. Another was a full-time police officer earning £50,000 a year who had to take on a second job as a support worker.
Ellie recalls: ‘Both of them reflected on the emotional toll it took, how draining it was to just need a helping hand, this feeling of, “Why am I being propositioned? Why am I being sexually harassed? Why is this the offer that I’m getting when [for] other people, it seems to be working?” One of the women had a loan that did work, and that went off without a hitch and the next time she tried it was just constant sexual harassment.’
It was the motivation that horrified Ellie the most. There are plenty of ways to find sexual content without exploiting vulnerable women, but she found that this was clearly a particular kink for so many men. At one point, Ellie was asked to film her flat and show the lender her empty cupboards – the dire state of her life and finances a sick turn-on. ‘That’s what I found the most disturbing thing, because it felt like what they were finding sexually arousing was this desperation, this vulnerability, taking advantage of the cost of living crisis, and the financial situation that so many people are in right now,’ says Ellie. ‘It was disgusting, to be honest.’
Ellie warns that these forums are so rife with sexual harassment that they are no-go areas for all women. ‘I got quite far down the road with someone who was leading me on, making it seem like he was happy to lend me the money, and just wanted to verify that I was who I said I was with a call. I would say if instinctively it feels as though somebody is messing you around, trying to get you to have a call late at night, trying to get you to send them lots of photos, reply to them constantly in messages, then those would all be warning signs for me. It’s really important to try and establish if they are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, otherwise you just don’t know who you might be dealing with.’
In response to the film, Reddit said: ‘Reddit has clear rules that prohibit illegal transactions and sexual harassment. In financial assistance communities, we aggressively enforce these rules and actively educate users about how to avoid and report illegal or predatory behaviour. We have banned multiple lending subreddits and regularly remove violating content and accounts. Pseudonymity does not exempt users from our rules or from legal accountability when laws are broken. Reddit uses a layered moderation approach to keep our platform safe and healthy.’
For Ellie, though, more needs to be done to crack down on sexual predators exploiting vulnerable people on social media. ‘Payday loans were obviously exploitative and the high interest rates that we saw from them were massively problematic for people, and while it’s a good thing that that doesn’t exist anymore, there is still so many people who need a bit of extra help at the end of the month, and that number is increasing. There needs to be more support for everyday people who are working hard and struggling to get by, so I’d like to see more intervention or support from the government to help people who are getting caught up, and the social media platforms need to stop predatory people operating on their sites and looking to take advantage of anyone who’s in a difficult situation.’
Hunting The Debt Predators: Dispatches airs tonight at 8pm on Channel 4.
