On the back of loans of up to 4,214% APR, Wonga have been forced to withdraw short-term loans it was offering to students.
In light of this indiscretion, the instant cash loan company has removed any reference to the cash advance loans offered on its website after it was labelled “incredibly irresponsible”.
However, the online short term loans organisation has not U-turned completely, confirming that it would still be assessing applications for short-term loans by students that could confirm they were in employment as well as studying.
Despite official research indicating that an instant cash loan of this nature could actually prove useful to graduates in this situation, the National Union of Students have refused to accept that this could be a good thing for anyone in education, whatever level.
The original article which attracted students to apply for instant cash loans at the astonishing interest rate were, as it turns out, misconstrued as the scripts were actually written to satisfy website crawlers and get Wonga to the top of the search engine pages, rather than for humans.
The fact that substance and content was sacrificed for page ranking – well, you have to be a writer for the Internet to understand how happy it makes one to see someone finally get their comeuppance for employing people who have only a limited grasp of English but are cheap. It’s about time, and perhaps that will be a lesson to other big institutes who outsource this work to foreign climes to stop, not that we imply that this was the case, in this instance.
What price can a growing organisation like Wonga place on reputation? Especially in a marketplace as competitive as short term loans, where there are thousands of companies promising to offer loans for bad credit or instant cash loans that can be in your bank account within 24 hours, often sooner.
It has cost them a lot more, one suspects, for this slight than it would have had it employed competence in either copy-editing or proofreading in the first place, whichever one was at fault, if not both.
The instant cash loan company, whose advert inadvisably could have been understood as encouraging students to live beyond their means, admitted that the article no longer had a place on its site as it “gave rise to misunderstandings.”