Singapore loan sharks hiring foreign thugs

Illegal money lending syndicates in Singapore are hiring foreign thugs, including from Taiwan and Vietnam, to harass delinquent borrowers into paying up, police said yesterday.

The loan sharks have resorted to recruiting foreign “runners” in the hope that they can avoid detection and arrest by the authorities because they enter on short-term social visit passes and have no fixed addresses.

Police said 50 foreigners working for illegal money lenders were arrested in 2010, more than double the 22 people nabbed the year before.

Some of the most notable cases involved loan shark runners recruited from Taiwan and Vietnam, they said.

“These foreign loan shark runners are often recruited overseas, are usually in Singapore for a short period of time and may not have a fixed place of abode,” police said at their annual briefing on the local crime situation.

Loan shark runners usually harass delinquent borrowers by splashing paint on their homes and publicly shaming them by writing their name, home address and telephone number on the walls of high-rise housing blocks.

In extreme cases they throw human or animal faeces, urine or kerosene on a defaulting borrower’s doorstep or letterbox. They may also physically threaten the borrower.

Assistant police commissioner Hoong Wee Teck, director of the Criminal Investigation Department, said loanshark syndicates “are mistaken if they think they can circumvent the law by bringing in foreign nationals to commit crime on their behalf.”

He warned that “both foreigners and the syndicates behind them will be taken to task to the fullest extent possible under our laws.”

Unlicensed money lending and harassment are criminal offences in Singapore.

Overall, crimes reported in the island-state, one of Asia’s safest cities, fell 0.6 per cent in 2010, police said.