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Naming and Shaming

Interesting way to collect debt - by naming and shaming the person. The strategy could make anyone squeamish:

Reports of OKash using social shaming started to surface almost as soon as the app went live. And people immediately felt the fallout. A University of Nairobi student told me on Twitter that the texts cost him his relationship, and another user told me his boss almost fired him for embarrassing the company. Another user, who wished to remain anonymous, told me he had read the fine print and knew OKash that would contact some people if he didn’t repay. 

Such are the uses of social networks, My father can be a stubborn old man sometimes refuse to do go see a doctor and instead tough it out at home. As soon as I get wind of such incident, I alert members of the extended family who can start leaning on him to do what is right. Depending on the situation at had and the sense of urgency I instill on my relatives, we can see results in as little as a couple of days. Not quite social shaming but he definitely does not enjoy receiving calls and messages on the same topic from an assortment of folks. 

.. OKash is only one of many companies around the world using social networks to leverage the power of shame. Last January, a local court in China’s Hubei province used WeChat to release a “map of deadbeat debtors.” In Russia, an online newspaper launched an app called Parking Douche that let citizens upload photos of badly parked cars, which were then fed into pop-up ads on the paper’s website. Before the 2018 US midterm elections, an app called VoteWithMe was released that made it easy for users to check the voting histories of people in their contacts.

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