Borrowers Are Being Misled at Scale. (And Why We Need Your Help to Stop Them)

The loan market is getting more confusing, and the public can no longer tell who’s being honest. We need your help, because this affects you more than you think.

We started FindTheLoan.com with a simple goal. The subprime mortgage crisis and the many laws and lawsuits that regulators from the UK to the US have taken since then all point to the same truth: as long as intermediaries sit in the middle, conflicts of interest can arise. The best way to protect borrowers is to remove the human element as much as possible.

Image credit: Lendingpot's business head

Even when we caught the smoking gun — a loan "comparison" website essentially admitting that they and the entire industry have been misleading consumers for years — and when we began directly running ads to educate the public and urging people to speak up, we still received less attention than someone posting about a zi char stall on Stomp or a hair found in cai png.

The bigger issue is not just clickbait or misleading ads. Imagine taking up a so‑called "compared" rate, then manually applying elsewhere and finding a cheaper rate — but now being stuck paying thousands more over your loan tenure simply because you trusted what was presented upfront.

Image credit: The above are publicity materials you can easily find on Google and, ironically, on Seedly, a comparison and personal finance website.

After three years of painstaking work to build a loan marketplace that lets borrowers reach multiple lenders directly — without depending on intermediaries who may or may not act in the borrower's best interest — we believed we had created a truly fair product. But the loan market keeps getting noisier. The public is overwhelmed. Fake reviews, false claims, and even smaller lenders advertising fake loan types continue to spread.

Anyone we manage to speak to and educate about how loan comparison websites really work and the actions taken by regulators overseas, or about what loan brokers actually do and the false claims they make — such as promising to negotiate a lower interest rate for you — immediately understands the problem. But it is not sustainable to talk to customers one at a time. We cannot personally educate every borrower while misleading marketing reaches thousands at once.

We escalated these issues to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Consumers Association of Singapore, and the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force. These agencies handle a wide range of cases, and broad industry‑wide marketing problems often take time to surface as clear enforcement priorities. Even with the evidence we submitted, there has yet to be a visible shift in practices. Misleading rates continue, fake reviews continue, and the public still cannot tell who is being honest. In many situations, action only follows when there is strong public signalling or recurring complaints that show the issue affects a wide base of consumers.

This is why we need your help. When regulators do not act and marketing drowns out the truth, only public awareness can shift the industry. Your voice — your comments, your shares, your questions — can reach borrowers we will never be able to reach individually. We’ve had people write to us to thank us for speaking up — and while we’re grateful, those messages also reveal the scale of the challenge. A handful of private thank-yous cannot counter an industry that reaches tens of thousands with polished marketing every day. Quiet appreciation does not create public pressure; visible awareness does 👉 https://www.mas.gov.sg/contact-us

Learn how we keep our content accurate in our Editorial Policy.

Share on: