The Justice Ministry has warned that the problem of loan sharks has not improved, despite a government crackdown on underground lending.
The number of complaints to the ministry from debtors complaining of exploitation has not dropped, despite the campaign launched soon after the regime took over last year.
A ministry centre for helping debtors receives more than 200 complaints a year, said Pol Lt Col Wichai Suwanprasert, its head.
The total value of debts to these loan sharks amounted to more than 1 billion baht per year, he said.
The debtors submitting the complaints came from about 40 provinces nationwide, where sometimes one creditor had more than 50 debtors, he said.
In Chaiyaphum in the Northeast, for instance, a loan shark who was a teacher had up to 745 debtors at a time and some of them were forced to repay triple the actual amount of money borrowed, Pol Lt Col Wichai.
One debtor was forced to repay up to 300,000 baht even though he had actually borrowed only 100,000 baht, he said.
Most of the debtors who lived in urban areas were vendors and salary earners while those living in rural areas were mostly farmers, he said.
"The types of [problematic] non-bank debts differ from region to region. In the North, for instance, most of the cases involved debtors being lured into signing an unfair hire purchase contract for agricultural machinery," he said.
Debtors in the Central Plains, meanwhile, mostly complained about being treated badly by debt-collecting gangs.
Central Plains farmers referred to the gangs as "crash helmet gangs" since they wear motorcycle crash helmets to hide their identities, he said.
The debtors revealed they were forced to pay a 2% per day interest rate, or about 20% per month, he said.
In the South, most debtors complained about unfair hire purchase contracts for cars, while debtors in the Northeast complained about the "crash helmet gangs", he said.
Most debtors in the Northeast had been lured into signing unfair hire purchase contracts for agricultural machinery and consignment sales, he said.
Hire purchase debt scams were rife in the Central Plains and Northeast provinces where many victims had been hooked by dishonest creditors using the internet to spread deceptive advertisements.
Pol Lt Col Wichai said the centre was working with the Department of Special Investigation and the Central Investigation Bureau to probe the complaints and take legal action against the loan sharks.
The amount of household debt as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) has been rising, said Phanit Kerkchokchai, former head of the learning centre at the Stock Exchange of Thailand and now adviser to the Foundation of Virtuous Youth.
Household debts accounted for 63% of GDP in 2010, 85.9% last year and 90% this year, she said.
Of all household debt, only 6.5% were "good debts" on the basis they were debts taken out to raise borrowers' quality of life, such as mortgages, she said.