How much must I pay the pawn shop?
Sir I went to this other pawn shop in Mogoditshane to pawn my car since I needed cash urgently. That was in October. I got P5,000 and they said I will be paying P6,119.
Then I was 2 months without paying. When I checked in January it was around P10,000 and I told them that I will be coming to pay in 2 days only to be told that my credit will start charging day by day. Guess when I went to check after the 2 days the credit was at P13,800. When I asked why they said this is how it is. I managed to pay P9,000 and the remaining they said I should do I roll over.
Mind you at this point the car that I pawned had a breakdown in Palapye. It's there now and they told me I should bring it. I told them I don't have money to go get it. Since I signed for the roll over they cannot credit me the change. You borrow from P5,000 upwards, from that P3,800 I did manage to pay they say they will be charging day by day if I don't bring the car. When I calculated this is P1,000 per day, Please help is this how things are supposed to be sir?
Readers of The Voice will know that there are some things I really dislike. I really dislike hire purchase and I really dislike shady microlenders. I also really dislike the gambling industry. The thing they have in common is that they are all designed to promise great things but are actually based on exploiting the desperate and unwise.
But there's something I dislike even more. Pawn shops. They promise a quick and easy way to get some cash but the conditions and costs are punishing. And if things go wrong, victims can easily find themselves in desperate situations like yours.
I think this particular pawn shop is behaving very suspiciously and it's time we involved the regulator, NBFIRA and see if they can assist you. This pawn shop needs to answer some tough questions.
A Facebook warning
We've had a tough time with Facebook recently.
As members of the Consumer Watchdog Facebook group know, we frequently post warnings about scams of all sorts. Hopefully the message gets to the members of the group who are now more than 231,000 and they can then spread the word to their families, friends, workmates and neighbors.
Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't seem to understand how this works. They have systems that are meant to prevent scams and abusive posts but it turns out this doesn't work very well.
Two weeks ago I posted a warning on Facebook about a scam. The post included some of the messages I had sent and received from the scammer. The good news is that many people responded, understanding that is was a scam alert. The bad news is that Facebook's system, completely misunderstood and saw it as promoting a scam. As a result, my Facebook profile was twice suspended and the Consumer Watchdog group has been threatened with closure.
The lesson is simple. Technology is great, but we can't always trust what human beings have done with it. Be careful what you post on Facebook. They find it difficult to tell the difference between scammers and those protecting people against them.
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