Loan recovery harassment: your rights and where to complain

• Call you before 8 am or after 7 pm, or call you persistently at any time.
• Threaten, intimidate or abuse you, verbally or physically, make anonymous calls, or humiliate you in public.
• Harass your family, referees, friends or colleagues, intrude on their privacy, or message your contacts to shame you.
• Send inappropriate messages, or use your phone’s contacts, photos or files — RBI’s digital lending rules bar lending apps from accessing them.

• To be told which recovery agent, if any, will contact you, before they do. Under RBI’s digital lending rules the lender must tell you the agent’s details.
• An agent who identifies themselves and the lender they act for.
• Your loan details in writing: what is overdue, the charges, and how to pay the lender directly.

Pay only into the lender’s own account or link — never to an agent’s personal account or UPI ID.

1. Write down dates, times, numbers and what was said; keep screenshots and call recordings.
2. Complain to the lender’s grievance redressal officer — every regulated lender must name one. If the agent came through Innopay Money, see our grievance redressal page.
3. If the lender rejects your complaint, you are not satisfied with its reply, or it does not reply within 30 days: complain to the RBI Ombudsman at cms.rbi.org.in (for complaints against RBI-regulated lenders, generally within a year of the lender’s reply).
4. Threats, extortion or misuse of your photos: report to the police or at cybercrime.gov.in. If money was taken from you by fraud, call the cyber-fraud helpline 1930.
5. An app that is not linked to any regulated lender: report it on RBI’s Sachet portal, sachet.rbi.org.in.

Talk to the lender directly and early, and keep it in writing. Knowing what a missed payment costs helps: missed EMI: what happens. Before your next loan, check that the app names a regulated lender: is this loan app RBI approved?