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Westport Times, Volume II, Issue 204, 26 March 1868, Page 3

The Loan-Office Swindle. —The London Review exposes the swindling practices of the loan offices, whose benevolent advertisements appear so regularly in certain journals. The fact is, that the obtaining of inquiry fees and not the lending of money is the real business or these establishments and those persons who offer such liberal terms to all who are in want of cash. It is upon these fees that the so-called loan offices and petty discount concerns live. Some of them add another kind of business to that we have already mentioned. They act as detectives for sheriff s officers, and low attorneys bent upon the capture of debtors. The poor clerk or mechanic who is in difficulties is safe sooner or later to seeks to raise money at a loan office, and his whereabouts, which has perhaps been kept dark from the individual who has the ca. sa. out against him, is from that moment discovered. Eor a very small consideration the loan office of the advertising money-lender discloses, to those who trade is the capture of debtors where the individual they are seeking is to be found, and the road through Whitecross-street and Basinghall-street is then open to him. The "Review suggests that it should be punishable for any establishment even to open an office, unless it has proved that it possesses a certain capital, and that a law should bemade that when a proposed business' is not carried 1 through, all inquiry fees should be returned.