Bangladesh Bank Orders Banks and Mobile Wallets to Cut Off 30 Illegal Loan Apps Accused of Blackmail

The Order That Finally Cuts Off the Money

Bangladesh Bank has instructed every bank, mobile financial service provider and payment service operator in the country to immediately suspend payment services to a list of unauthorised online lending apps, and to raise public awareness about the risk they pose. The September 17 directive, issued under Section 15(2) of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act 2024, spells out that running a lending platform without central bank approval is a punishable offence under Section 37(1) of the same law. Bangladesh Bank has also asked the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission and other relevant authorities to get the apps pulled from the Google Play Store and to stop their operations altogether.

Thirty Apps, One List

The directive names 30 apps operating illegally in Bangladesh, among them Sathi Loan, Pop Cash, FinCash, Quick Loan, Quick Taka, Dhaka Fin, LoanVibe, Dost Loan, Taka Cash Loan, KWANZA Loan, SSH Money, LoanBuddy, Cash-Hora, Alo Cash, Fast Loan, Easy Taka, Dhorjo Loan, Fin Dot Do, BongoCash, Asha Loan, Subidha Loan, Smart Loan BD, Online Loan BD, City Online Loan, BD Shohoj Loan, Cash Loan, Sonali, Loan Haat and Taka Nao. Bangladesh Bank says the apps charge extortionate interest rates, harvest personal data without meaningful consent, and in numerous cases, use that harvested data, contacts, photographs, message histories, to blackmail and harass borrowers who fall behind.

How the Scam Actually Works

The pattern is remarkably consistent across victim accounts collected by reporters over the past month. Shaheen Hossain, a private sector employee, borrowed 6,000 taka through FinCash in three separate instalments and ended up repaying nearly 10,000 taka, an effective rate close to 800 percent, after what he described as daily compounding threats. "The interest kept increasing daily, and I was receiving threats," he said, before he eventually paid to make the harassment stop. Saeed Mia, from Mirpur in Dhaka, borrowed a total of 24,000 taka and watched the app's own ledger show 81,000 taka in arrears within a week. When he paid down 54,000 taka and refused to pay more, the app's operators began calling his friends and relatives directly, threatening them too. Both cases follow the same script apps use nationwide, aggressive Facebook advertising to attract borrowers, broad permissions requested at installation that hand over contacts, photos and messages, and escalating threats the moment a payment is missed.

A Crackdown That's Been Slow to Bite

Date	Enforcement Action
August 4, 2026	BTRC sends first takedown notice to Google, naming 5 apps
August 25, 2026	BTRC sends second takedown notice, naming 18 more apps
August 27, 2026	Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit issues public warning naming 30 apps
September 3-4, 2026	Independent checks find several flagged apps, including one with over a million downloads, still live on the Play Store
September 17, 2026	Bangladesh Bank orders banks and MFS providers to cut off payments to all 30 apps

That timeline matters because it shows this week's order is not the opening move, it is at least the fourth attempt in six weeks to shut these apps down, and the first two takedown requests plainly did not work. As of early September, Dost Loan was still live with more than 100,000 downloads and a fresh update dated September 3. PopKash remained available with over a million downloads. DhakaFin, marketed as CashLoan, and FinCash were both still accessible as well. Google's own removal process, and BTRC's ability to force it, has simply not kept pace with how quickly these apps can be renamed, resubmitted or replaced by near identical clones once one version is taken down.

Why the Response Has Lagged

Part of the problem, according to reporting from late August, has been an enforcement gap on the law enforcement side. The Criminal Investigation Department and Dhaka Metropolitan Police told reporters they had received no formal complaints or opened cases over the loan app harassment, despite the scale of the problem, and only one victim among those interviewed had filed even an email complaint. A Bangladesh Bank spokesperson at the time said he was personally unaware illegal loan apps were operating, a striking admission for a body now issuing a formal blacklist directive weeks later. Shifting the enforcement lever to the payment layer, cutting off the banks and mobile wallets these apps rely on to actually move money, rather than relying solely on app store takedowns or police complaints that victims are often too afraid or ashamed to file, is a meaningfully different strategy, and one that does not depend on Google acting quickly or on frightened borrowers coming forward.

The Gap Between the Advertised Rate and the Real One

Regulatory filings and app store listings for these platforms typically advertise annual percentage rates in the range of 14.6 to 21.9 percent, numbers that would be unremarkable by the standards of formal Bangladeshi microfinance. The effective rates borrowers actually end up paying, once daily compounding, hidden origination fees as high as 60 percent of the loan amount, and penalty charges are factored in, have been documented running as high as 800 percent, a gap between the advertised price and the real one that is itself a form of deception layered on top of the harassment that follows a missed payment.

What Happens Next

With Bangladesh's population of roughly 190 million people and a genuine, unmet demand for small, fast, collateral free credit, particularly among borrowers who do not qualify for formal bank loans, illegal lending apps have found a real market gap to exploit, one that formal microfinance institutions and mobile financial services have not fully closed. Cutting off payment rails should make it materially harder for the 30 named apps to collect from new victims inside the formal banking system. Whether it stops the underlying business model depends on something the order cannot control directly, how quickly new apps, under new names, with new Play Store listings, appear to replace the ones this week's directive was built to shut down, and how seriously police begin treating harassment complaints that, until now, have gone almost entirely unrecorded.