Dave Monk

The England Illegal Money Lending Team (IMLT) are a government law enforcement agency with the powers to investigate, arrest, prosecute and convict Illegal Money Lenders - who are more commonly known as loan sharks. A loan shark is an individual or group of individuals who lend money without the correct permissions from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and in the UK it is criminal, not civil offence to lend money in order to make a profit, without these permissions.

As a LIAISE officer with the IMLT I have 2 distinct roles. The first is to raise people's awareness to the dangers of borrowing money from a loan shark and the second is to support the loan shark victims.

Loan sharks will predominantly prey on the most vulnerable in our society, can charge unbelievably high interest rates (the highest that we have encountered is 4.5 million %), can use a variety of tactics to collect money off their victims including harassment, threats, violence, blackmail, arson and even rape. The vast majority of victims will have suffered some form of abuse and are invariably traumatised and require specialist help and support from other agencies.

To date the IMLT have investigated in excess of 2500 loan sharks since it was formed in 2004, has helped in excess of 31,000 victims, is exempt from having to use the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and has an extremely enviable conviction rate of 100%!!

In addition we also use the powers of the Proceeds Of Crime Act (POCA) to seize and sell assets of loan sharks that have been gained by criminality and we use our share of this money to help promote our message by supporting and promoting credit unions, by providing credit union incentives and as well as by making grants available to organisations and agencies who in turn, also want to help us to promote our message of the dangers of borrowing off a loan shark.