Payday loans lender Wonga was conned by fraudsters into losing £3m, a court has heard, after they stole thousands of innocent people’s identities.
It was claimed that the criminals made more than 19,000 applications, each asking for loans to be paid into accounts which they had control over.
In order to verify that information provided in applications is correct, Wonga uses an algorithm to check that the applicant’s name and personal details match the account number.
It was claimed the fraudsters exploited a fault in the algorithm.
Not only did the group manage to cost Wonga a lot of money, they also ended up leaving the unsuspecting victims having to pay the interest payments (which were one per cent).
The prosecutor, Richard Hearnden said: “It would appear that this algorithm failed. The result was as many as 19,000 fraudulent applications were successfully processed and paid out.”
“The money was paid into bank accounts that had nothing to do with the people named in the loan application. Some repayments were actually made to Wonga fraudulently – in other words, some innocent people made repayments for loans which they hadn’t applied for,” he continued.
The jurors were also told how Wonga had failed to notice that every application had the same password (“Bengali90”). Nine people are on trial for being involved.
