When rates stay high for a long stretch, online lending platforms often advertise eye-catching yields — sometimes in the twenties or thirties — by matching retail money with companies that need short-term cash. Names rotate. The pitch is familiar: “lend to businesses, collect interest, the platform is listed somewhere official.” That last line is where people relax too early.
A platform appearing on a national investment-platform register is usually a permission to operate a marketplace, not a promise that your capital is protected like a bank deposit. Regulators themselves warn that crowdfunding and crowdlending can mean partial or total loss if a borrower defaults or the platform fails. France’s markets authority, for example, has urged extreme caution for exactly those reasons. Your return is the other side of someone else’s expensive debt. If that business was already stretching to refinance at punishing rates, a wave of defaults is not a surprise plot twist — it is the risk you bought.
Treat “32% from loans to companies” as credit risk first, marketing second. Read the default and recovery figures the platform publishes, assume illiquidity when you want out, and never confuse a register entry with insurance. If the same offer then migrates into a Telegram room that wants crypto top-ups “to unlock interest”, you have left crowdlending and entered a different script entirely.
If a lending-platform pitch led to a loss, start at Get help. If someone now sells “recovery” of those funds, read Fake recovery before paying.
This article is for general information only. It is not legal or financial advice. Details change. If you have lost money, contact your bank or card issuer and use the routes on the help pages.