“Today is the last chance to pay,” this is the message that panicked Mohsen Abdel Qader, a customer who defaulted on a loan worth 30,000 Egyptian pounds (591.5 US dollars) that he obtained from a financing application to purchase home appliances. It was the moment when the convenience of an installment plan turned into an imminent threat. When he called customer service to dispute interest charges that had ballooned beyond the size of his original loan, an employee cursed at him in the app instead of helping him.
His story, I mentioned Written by Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper, he is one of dozens of Egyptians who Receiving threatening messages From unknown numbers they are asked to pay their dues or face arrest, legal action, confiscation of property or defamation, often days after the payment deadline.
The Financial Supervision Authority in Egypt now supervises Nearly 2,500 Licensed consumer finance companies serve more than 64 million customers.
By the end of 2025, Egypt’s non-banking financial sector had amassed portfolios worth approximately EGP 417 billion (US$8.2 billion). According to According to official statistics, with more than 9.8 million financing contracts. Meanwhile, the default corporate interest rate remained below 3 percent.
Apps like Valu, Fawry, Contact, Souhoola, Halan, Forsa, Mylo and Sample allow users to finance everything from smartphones to school fees, usually through Payment due On the first of the month and a grace period of five days. When that window closes, collection agents, sometimes formally employed, sometimes outsourced, and whom frustrated online borrowers describe simply as “thugs,” begin calling, texting, and, in some accounts, calling relatives, neighbors and employers to force borrowers to repay.
While Egyptians face an economic crisis and years of… Wage erosionthey became dependent on the “buy now, pay later” industry. One of the few ways To maintain a comfortable life — a life that can easily turn into a scary life when payments are late.
On Facebook maila man named Ahmed shared a recording of a phone call with a woman who allegedly worked for Fawry and identified herself as Amira. She insults him, and when he says she’s a “thug” and doesn’t work for Fury, she encourages him to report her to Fury and present himself as a disgraced man in debt.
“I will send someone to your house to humiliate you and your entire family,” she says.
Ahmed replies that it is impossible for a disrespectful person like her to work for Fawry. She responds by saying that his “mother” is a disrespectful mother and that she failed to raise him properly. As the exchange escalates, Ahmed Threaten Legal action, while the caller taunts him, calling him a “pig” and wondering how he can afford a lawyer when he is unable to pay his debts.
Ahmed’s experience is not an isolated one, with borrowers across social media describing similar intimidation tactics allegedly used by debt collectors. According to According to accounts shared online, collectors visit customers’ homes, deliberately start arguments and create public scenes in apartment buildings to embarrass borrowers in front of neighbors and pressure them to pay.
On TikTok, there is a woman named Amira Massad He said She received repeated calls from unknown numbers threatening to publicly defame her unless she paid a debt of 8,000 Egyptian pounds (US$157.7). She said the callers warned her that they would confront her house if she failed to pay.
Similar accounts appeared on television, and During the advocacy programmeOne woman, whose name was not revealed, said that a woman she described as “thugs” came to her home to demand payment of a late installment of 2,500 Egyptian pounds (US$49.3) for a set of granite cookware she had bought. When she refused, the loan shark allegedly took the cooking utensils and left. She also claimed that the same conductor confiscated a television set from one of her neighbors to pay the late installments.
Others spoke of the psychological toll of dealing with debt collectors.
In one of Mohamed Atef’s Tik Tok videos He said Being homeless or a beggar was “a greater dignity” than borrowing from some lending companies, which he claimed outsourced collection of money to companies that employed people “worse than convicted criminals”.
Ahmed Al-Sarraf, another TikTok user, said he once was I offered She took a job at a debt collection company but turned it down after learning what the role entailed.
As an employee, he says in his TikTok video, he is required to call customers once and politely ask for payment. If payment remains late, he is given a list of phone numbers and told to call and harass the customer repeatedly, with the promise of a reward if the installments are paid. If those efforts fail, that’s part of his job involves Accompanying two other men to clients’ homes to intimidate and push them. Before he can start work, he is asked to sign a check for 50,000 Egyptian pounds (US$985.8) as a guarantee that the funds collected on behalf of the company will not be misappropriated.
Under the Egyptian Telecommunications Regulatory Law, intentionally harassing another person through repeated or abusive calls and messages is a criminal offense. It can also intimidate, defame or reveal the borrower’s financial details to third parties Expose Both individual collectors and the lending companies themselves have been subject to criminal charges and civil damages claims.
Consumer lenders are also subject to the Egyptian Consumer Finance Law of 2020, which introduced strict licensing requirements and confidentiality rules, with Penalties Including prison sentences for violations. However, as the industry expands, concerns grow that existing safeguards are not sufficient.
On May 19, Member of Parliament Hassan Ammar was arrested. I submitted a formal application To the Egyptian Prime Minister, the Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt and the Chairman of the Financial Regulatory Authority, warning that unsupervised lending traps families in a cycle of increasing debt, interest and penalties while posing risks to the broader economy. He called for tightening regulations to limit the growth of the industry. The expansion has gone beyond oversight, as not all lenders have properly checked borrowers’ ability to repay.
Currently, no crackdown on debt collection tactics has followed, and borrowers continue to exchange accounts of humiliation and intimidation, creating a public archive of a credit boom whose costs are only beginning to accrue.