Your Rights as a Borrower: What Loan Apps Can and Cannot Do

Signing a loan agreement does not sign away your dignity or your privacy. Nigerian consumer-protection and data-protection laws apply to digital lenders just as they do to banks, and the rules are clearer than most borrowers realise.

What a loan app may do

• Assess you with the information you actually consented to share, including your repayment history held at the credit bureaus.
• Charge the fees and interest that were clearly disclosed to you before you accepted the loan.
• Remind you about a genuinely overdue loan through reasonable, daytime contact with you.
• Report a true record of your repayment behaviour to a licensed credit bureau.

What a loan app may NOT do

• Shame you: telling your contacts, employer or family that you owe money is a serious violation — it has repeatedly drawn regulatory sanctions.
• Threaten arrest: loan default is a civil matter. Nobody is coming to arrest you over an unpaid app loan.
• Threaten you physically or use abusive or insulting language.
• Hide the real cost: burying punishing fees in fine print or changing terms after disbursement.
• Harvest without need: scooping your contacts, photos or messages where it is not necessary, or using data for purposes you never agreed to.
• Call at dawn and midnight. Constant, timed-to-terrorise calling is harassment, not collection.

Your four practical powers

1. The power of records. Everything they send you is potential evidence — save it. 2. The power of complaint. Regulators have sanctioned and deleted apps over borrower complaints; yours can be one of them. 3. The power of accuracy. You can dispute any false entry on your credit report. 4. The power of refusal. You can reject an app whose permissions or terms look predatory — before you ever owe it anything.

Read the deeper playbook in Protect Yourself, and check your record with our credit-report guide.