The Sunday People has reported that a manager at one of the largest payday loan firms in the UK has claimed she was ordered to “take the rings off the fingers” of people who owed money, but couldn’t afford to do so.
Working at the payday loan company Cheque Centre, which has 350 branches in the UK, Lorraine Coull expressed the concerns she had back in 2010 when the company gave out payday loans to unemployed people who were receiving benefits.
“We were told that if customers came in wearing gold jewellery and they couldn’t pay their interest, we should offer to buy it from them. Those people were trying to fight their way out of debt to survive and make a better life,” Lorraine said.
“But to Cheque Centre, they were just a way of making money. They didn’t care that people couldn’t afford repayments.”
Not only did Lorraine report these controversial acts, she won a case for unfair dismissal from the lender after she was sacked in 2013. This was after the company had set ‘sky-high’ targets which were unachievable, with her claiming she was wrongly sacked after failing to meet the impossibly-high targets.
