
Phone users accompanied by representatives of the Thailand Consumers Council (TCC) on Tuesday filed a complaint with police about alleged offences through pre-installed loan apps in their Oppo and Realme phones.
The group, which included about 40 phone users, went to the Central Investigation Bureau to file their complaint with consumer protection police.
Patarakorn Teepboonrat, TCC’s deputy head for consumer rights protection, said the complainants were among the 192 phone users who have filed complaints with the council about personal data breaches and illegal lending.
The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society recently said loan apps were pre-installed in about 4 million Oppo and Realme phones.
Through such pre-installed loan apps, phone users had already borrowed about 15 million baht in total, Mr Patarakorn said.
He said that debtors paid instalments to accounts of Thai-registered juristic persons connected with foreign networks.
TCC lawyer Jina Yam-uam said the council was guiding complainants to file class action criminal and civil lawsuits against all parties responsible, including app owners in other countries and their Thai nominees. The council planned to seek compensation for all individual complainants, he said.
Loan apps were either pre-installed on phones or automatically installed when their operating systems were updated, the lawyer said. He urged the distributors of Oppo and Realme phones to reveal the loan app owners to prove the distributors’ innocence.
Pornwut Pipatanadetsak, TCC head for policy and innovation, said pre-installation of loan apps breached consumer rights because it consumed phone capacity without the phone user's consent, and users could not uninstall such apps, which had access to their personal data.
Patipol Putthachuchart, a 31-year-old complainant, said he bought an Oppo phone and found pre-installed Fineasy and another loan app.
He said that after software updates, at least 10 other apps were automatically installed and they appeared to be gambling apps.
The consumer council has called on Chinese smartphone brands Oppo and its subsidiary Realme to explain reports from smartphone users that loan offering apps pre-installed on some of their mobile phone models could not be uninstalled and were capable of sending loan invitations and accessing users' personal data, including contacts lists and phone numbers.