Too many people in Britain are swimming with sharks. New CSJ analysis suggests that half a million more people could be borrowing from a loan shark today than in 2022, with a total of 1.7 million people in England and two million people across the UK likely borrowing from an illegal money lender.
Yet, as we argued in our 2022 report Swimming with Sharks, the popular image of a loan shark does not always hold.
In that report, we identified that a majority of victims knew the loan shark before borrowing
from them with many even considering them a friend. Loans sharks were as, if not more, likely to inflict psychological manipulation, online shaming, and verbal harassment as direct physical violence.
Updating the unpublished dataset used in Swimming with Sharks, we find that these trends persist. Between 2022 and 2025, 66 per cent of victims supported by the Illegal Money Lending Team (IMLT) met their loan shark through friends or family, 60 per cent considered their lender a friend before borrowing from them, and 28 per cent were threatened with social media shaming.
There is, moreover, little evidence that the demand for illegal lending is abating. The most common reason cited for borrowing from a loan shark was to cover everyday costs like household bills and groceries, with many other victims citing helping family, covering the cost of life events such as funerals and weddings, vehicle repairs, and business costs.
These victims turn to illegal lending because they cannot – or assume they cannot – access credit elsewhere. Almost three quarters of those who try to access other sources of credit are rejected by regulated lenders. This is the gap illegal lenders insidiously fill. Tackling illegal money lending requires both suppressing its supply and re-directing its demand.
To clear the waters, we are calling for renewed action to:
- clamp down on lenders, tackling criminal exploitation on the high street and using the Online Safety Act to crackdown on those abusing social media to harass victims;
- expand the supply of safer credit, fulfilling promised common bond reform and assessing the place of high-cost credit;
- buttress the debt advise sector, with stronger training mandates and warm referrals to the IMLT.
None of these policies are costly. They require small legislative amendments and the strengthening of action already underway. But they could be life-changing, if not lifesaving, for those sinking in shark-infested waters.
