admin ‘Today is the last chance to pay,’ is the message that induced panic for Mohsen Abdelkader, a customer who had fallen behind on an EGP 30,000 (USD 591.5) loan he took from a financing application to buy household appliances. It was the moment a convenient installment plan curdled into a near threat. When he called customer service to dispute interest charges that had ballooned past the size of his original loan, an employee at the application cursed at him instead of helping.
His story, reported by the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, is one of dozens of Egyptians who receive threatening messages from unknown numbers. They are asked to pay their dues or face arrest, legal action, property seizure, or reputation defamation, often days after a missed payment deadline.
Egypt’s Financial Regulatory Authority now oversees roughly 2,500 licensed consumer-finance companies serving more than 64 million customers.
By the end of 2025, Egypt’s non-bank financial sector had amassed portfolios worth roughly EGP 417 billion (USD 8.2 billion), according to official statistics, with more than 9.8 million financing contracts. Meanwhile, the default interest rate for the companies remained below 3 percent.
Applications like Valu, Fawry, Contact, Souhoola, Halan, Forsa, Mylo, Sympl, and many more let users finance everything from smartphones to school fees, typically with a payment due on the first of the month and a five-day grace period. When that window closes, collection agents, sometimes formally employed, sometimes outsourced, and described by frustrated borrowers online simply as “thugs,” begin calling, texting, and, in some accounts, contacting relatives, neighbors, and employers to shame borrowers into paying.
As Egyptians face an economic crisis and years of eroding wages, their reliance on the “buy now, pay later” industry has become one of the few ways to maintain a comfortable life —one that can easily turn into a fearful one when payments are delayed.
In a Facebook post, a man called Ahmed shared a recording of a phone call with a woman who allegedly works for Fawry and identified herself as Amira. She humiliates him, and when he says that she is a “thug” who does not work for Fawry, she encourages him to report her to Fawry and introduce himself as a shameful man in debt.
“I am going to send someone to your home to humiliate you and your whole family,” she says.
Ahmed responds that there is no way someone as disrespectful as her could work for Fawry. She fires back that “his mother” is the disrespectful one and that she failed to raise him properly. As the exchange escalates, Ahmed threatens legal action, while the caller mocks him, calling him “a pig” and questioning how he could afford a lawyer when he cannot repay his debts.
Ahmed’s experience is not an isolated one, as borrowers across social media describe similar intimidation tactics allegedly used by debt collectors. According to accounts shared online, collectors visit customers’ homes, deliberately start arguments and create public scenes in apartment buildings to shame borrowers in front of neighbours and pressure them into paying.
On TikTok, a woman named Amira Mosad said she received repeated calls from unknown numbers threatening to publicly defame her unless she repaid a debt of EGP 8,000 (USD 157.7). She said callers warned they would stage a confrontation outside her home if she failed to pay.
Similar accounts have surfaced on television, and during a call-in program, a woman, whose name was not disclosed, said a woman she described as a “thug” came to her home demanding payment of an overdue EGP 2,500 (USD 49.3) installment for a set of granite cookware she had purchased. When she refused, the female loan shark allegedly took the cookware and left. She also claimed the same collector confiscated a television from one of her neighbours as payment for overdue installments.
Others have spoken out about the psychological toll of dealing with debt collectors.
In one TikTok video, Mohamed Atef said it is “more dignified to be homeless or a beggar” than to borrow from some lending companies, which he claimed outsource collections to firms employing people “worse than convicted criminals.”
Ahmed Alsarraf, another TikTok user, said he was once offered a job at a debt collection company but turned it down after learning what the role involved.
As an employee, in his TikTok video, he says he is required to call customers once, politely requesting payment. If the payment remains overdue, he is given a list of phone numbers and instructed to repeatedly contact and harass the customer, with the promise of a bonus if the installments are paid. If those efforts fail, part of his job involves accompanying two other men to customers’ homes to intimidate them into paying. Before he can begin working, he is required to sign a cheque for EGP 50,000 (USD 985.8) as a guarantee that he will not embezzle money collected on the company’s behalf.
Under Egypt’s Telecommunications Regulation Law, deliberately harassing another person through repeated or abusive calls and messages is a criminal offense. Intimidation, defamation, or disclosure of a borrower’s private financial details to third parties can also expose both individual collectors and the lending companies themselves to criminal charges and civil damages claims.
Consumer lenders are also subject to Egypt’s 2020 Consumer Finance Law, which introduced licensing requirements and strict confidentiality rules, with penalties including prison time for violations. Yet as the industry has expanded, concerns have grown that existing safeguards are not enough.
On May 19, a member of Parliament, Hassan Ammar, submitted a formal request to the Egyptian prime minister, the governor of the Central Bank of Egypt and the chairman of the Financial Regulatory Authority, warning that unchecked lending was trapping families in a cycle of debt, interest and mounting penalties while posing risks to the broader economy. He called for tighter regulations to curb the industry’s growth. The expansion has outpaced oversight, as not all lenders properly vet borrowers’ ability to repay.
For now, no comprehensive crackdown on debt collection tactics has followed, and borrowers continue to share accounts of humiliation and intimidation, creating a running public archive of a credit boom whose costs are only beginning to come due.
