You will practise verifying lenders and spotting illegal offers using real examples.
Kumar's mother forwarded him a screenshot last week. It was a colourful post on social media from a "licensed money lender" with a smiling logo, a list of loan types and a WhatsApp number. "Is this one OK?" she asked. He realised he could answer in about two minutes, and that most of the people she knew could not.
This exercise gives you the same two minutes. You collect three real loan offers, check each one against the Ministry of Law's list and the advertising rules, and mark it licensed, unlicensed or impossible to verify. Allow about 15 minutes.
Find three loan advertisements or messages. Good places to look are the first page of results when you search for a moneylender, sponsored posts on social media, and your own phone's SMS and WhatsApp, where unsolicited offers tend to collect. Try to get a mix, so at least one comes from a search result and at least one from a message or post.
For each offer, write down exactly what it shows: the business name as written, any address, any licence number, the phone number or contact method, and how it reached you, and keep a screenshot of each. Do not reply to any message or click any link while you do this. Lesson 8.2, How loan sharks find you and what happens next, explained why.
Kumar's three, described here as an example: a search result for a company with a name, an address in a shopping centre in the west and a website; his mother's social media post with a business name and only a WhatsApp number; and an SMS offering a loan with no business name at all.
Open the list of licensed moneylenders on the Ministry of Law website, mlaw.gov.sg. For each offer that gives a business name, search the list for it.
Check the name letter by letter. As lesson 8.1, How to check a moneylender is licensed, explained, illegal lenders often copy a real lender's name with a small change. Then put the address on the advertisement beside the address of the place of business on the list, because a matching name with a different address fails the check.
Kumar's search result matched exactly: same name, same address. The business name in his mother's post was close to a licensed lender's but not identical, and the post gave no address at all. The SMS had no name to check.
Now look at how each offer reached you, against the advertising rules on the Ministry of Law website. Licensed moneylenders may advertise only through approved channels, such as their own websites, directories and their own premises. They may not market through SMS, WhatsApp, social media or cold calls.
Kumar's search result led to the lender's own website, which is an allowed channel. His mother's post was a social media advertisement steering people to WhatsApp, and the SMS arrived unasked, so both used channels a licensed lender is not allowed to use for marketing, and either fact on its own would be enough to rule them out.
Give each offer one of three marks, with the reason in a line.
Licensed means the name and address match the Ministry of Law's list exactly and the advertisement uses an allowed channel, which is true of Kumar's search result. That mark says the lender is allowed to operate. It does not say the loan is cheap or suitable, which is a separate question covered by the comparisons in module 3.
Unlicensed means the offer fails the list check or uses a marketing channel licensed lenders may not use. Kumar's mother's post and the SMS are both unlicensed, the post because the name does not match and the channel is not allowed, the SMS because of the channel alone.
Impossible to verify means you cannot check it: no business name, a name too generic to match, or details that conflict. In practice, treat this the same as unlicensed. If you cannot confirm who a lender is, you should not deal with them.
If any of your offers is unlicensed, report it to the Singapore Police Force as described in lesson 8.2, and block the number.
A finished check has three rows, one per offer, each with the details as shown, the result of the list check, how it was marketed, the mark and a one-line reason. Below it is one sentence you would use to explain the difference to a family member.
Kumar's sentence for his mother was short, and she remembered it. Yours should be something you could say on the phone to a parent or an older relative who has just received a message like hers, in words they would actually use.
Complete the three-offer check and write one sentence on how you would explain the difference to a family member.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).