Consumer Council raps Oppo Thailand for business practices

Although Oppo Thailand issued a statement on Friday denying any involvement with third-party lending applications, it failed to provide transparent information about the developers of these apps or those involved in illegal lending businesses. 

This has led the Consumer Council to believe that the company has not taken adequate responsibility for the issue and lacks appropriate measures to remedy the situation for consumers.

On Saturday, Ponwuth Pipattanadejsak, head of policy and innovation at the Consumer Council, said the council will file a class-action lawsuit to help victims of illegal loan apps, and will also file a complaint against Oppo and Realme. 

Ponwuth said that based on complaints and public facts, it is highly likely that both companies have violated multiple laws. He urged relevant authorities to take swift legal action and summarised seven key points highlighting the seriousness of the issue:

• Consumers have suffered from illegal lending businesses under Oppo’s umbrella. Complaints over the past week include cases where "interest was charged before receiving the first loan instalment, resulting in consumers receiving less than the borrowed amount".
• The Consumer Council has also received complaints about "debt-collection practices targeting people around the borrower, causing embarrassment".
• How did the phone number of the device owner end up in the hands of these apps?
• The installation of the app along with the Oppo phone, with no option to uninstall, represents a severe violation of basic consumer rights.
• The app installation not only takes up storage space on the phone but, at times, also runs in the background, possibly using the user’s internet connection.
• Oppo has not prioritised sufficiently addressing the damage caused by this issue. While it stopped selling affected products, reports indicate that Oppo phones with these apps are still available in major department stores. 
• Additionally, users who updated the apps found that although the new version allows uninstallation, they are now being bombarded with loan advertisement notifications.

This case should serve as an example to deter other illegal loan apps still present on the Play Store or pre-installed on phones from other brands.

Ponwuth further stated that various civil-society networks, particularly technology experts, have been investigating the origin of data transmission through the Fineasy and Happiness Loan apps by tracing the source code and API (application programming interface) behind the applications. They found possible links to other illegal lending apps. 

The Consumer Council views this as just one example and the beginning of the search for numerous other illegal lending apps, as well as other mobile-phone brands operating similarly to Oppo.

Therefore, the Consumer Council urges government agencies to use their legal authority to penalise Oppo and Realme for their business operations. This will prevent setting a precedent for other companies and ensure that they strictly follow consumer-protection laws and safeguard public interests.

The Consumer Council also invites affected citizens to file complaints this Tuesday at 9.30am at the Central Investigation Bureau to push for the prosecution of the case until its conclusion.

These two Chinese smartphone manufacturers admitted to the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) on January 12 that the loan applications Fineasy and Happiness Loan were pre-installed on their devices without approval from the Bank of Thailand (BOT).

Consumers had reported to the Thai Consumer Council that the irremovable apps had been installed on their phones without their knowledge and could send notifications as well as access their personal information.