The more I watch programs like Hunting The Debt Predators the more I want to stay as far away from unmoderated unchecked social media as I can. I immediately deleted my Reddit account which took some doing I might add.

I would normally have nothing but good things to say about the platform Reddit, the anonymous discussion platform that yields a lot of real life information leaning away from advertising and marketing and leaning towards real life experience, both praising and calling out brands, services, products and people. I am one of the few people who never signed up for or used Facebook but I do use Reddit. I liked it for it’s offering, giving people the chance to have their say, and helpful for visitors to gain clarity before making decisions, the same way this platform does and I have found it useful to cut through marketing when deciding if something was right for me. But clearly following Ellie Flynn’s brave expose Reddit itself has been exposed as a facilitator for some very bad, unscrupulous and scary people that they the platform have the power to stop and clearly aren’t.

The film is a real life thriller, I literally could not believe what people are enduring at the hands of unscrupulous illegal money lenders and sex pests posing as money lenders on social media platforms and it’s not just Reddit to be wary of.

The film also looked as the whys behind these scammers. The desperation that drives vulnerable people, many of them women into positions criminals are able to exploit. The film even profiled professional people, a policewoman with 25 years service working a second job as a community carer and a nurse shamed into a second job as an escort because of financial insecurity, worry and stress.

This film was a harrowing insight into an underworld facilitated by big companies like Reddit and TikTok and showed how little these platforms are aware of what indeed is going on. It was really scary.

In the film journalist Ellie Flynn even comes face-to-face with one of these illegal lenders, who shows absolutely no remorse, actually painting himself as the good guy, describing himself as fair, (because he only attacks property not people when borrowers cannot pay) for exploiting vulnerable people and making their lives hell.

The interest rates on loans exposed as being up to 4000% apr, annual percentage rate. These lenders are keeping people trapped on a never ending cycle of debt, taking their bank cards, log books, and exploiting their personal data to open up to 10 illegal bank accounts for money laundering purposes.

But the worst of all are the sex pests posing as money lenders, asking for nude pictures and wanting to call loan applicants naked for kicks. Harassing and pestering for explicit images before granting a loan. Of course there is no loan, they just don’t want to pay for legal explicit content. The hook for the loan applicant if you do this for me you get your loan with no need to repay.

But there is no loan. They exploit, take the images, expose themselves to women on video calls, get off on the power and then disappear.

I have to say the program made me sick. Made me realise how naive I am and uneducated about the length’s people will actually go to to prey on exploit unsuspecting people needing a relatively small amount of money, as little as £50, £70, or £100 just to get by.

Thank you to the dispatches team for this amazing documentary and to the journalist Ellie Flynn for having the guts to face these people and share who she was and that she was onto them.

One company Brit Loan, on TikTok, with a website and profile, completely disappeared following her investigation.

Everyone should watch this. We all and I am including myself need to wake up and get back into the real world for our help and support.

Platforms like Reddit, somewhere I would have in the past praised as being a place to get real information are complicit in this criminal unregulated activity happening on their platform. They are the biggest of their kind in the world. So I don’t anticipate them changing anytime soon, it is not conducive for them or their algorithm to prohibit users from accessing what they need, these platforms relying on being addictive to gain and maintain market share.

It is for us the consumer to stay away from these dangerous places. You think you are protected, at arms length online. Ellie Flynn showed in her shocking film that is just not the case. I am now viewing Reddit in a completely different light after watching this, a sess pit full of predators and as somewhere dangerous I just won’t go again