Shark Attacks in Costa Rica :When People Bite

 a relatively new business in Costa Rica, and a very lucrative one: Loan Sharking.(Loan Sharks) You don’t need an office, storefront, staff, personal assistant or merchandise. It has the added cachet of being an industry imported mostly via foreign criminal groups, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just follow their tried and true methods. And loan sharking in Costa Rica is HOT now. Costa Rica is well-situated along the drug-trafficking routes coming up from South America, and the Costa Rica economy is in crisis. The business is known throughout Latin America as “gota a gota”, or drop by drop.
Here’s how you get started. Put up dozens of flyers throughout town offering credit and large sums of money. Feature your phone number and a carefully worded come-on promising to end people’s cash flow problems forever, with only one easy phone call. Reportedly, a mere 30 minutes later, the loan shark (Tiburon) will arrive offering $15,000 or more in exchange for a valid i.d. and a stable address. The recipient must agree to pay interest on the loan, often at the rate of $25 a week on a $100 loan. Accept, and your life really becomes a nightmare.
Things usually start well, but then people often fall behind on their payments. The interest rate is then increased on the loan. If you do not pay, they threaten to kill you, or go to your house to make threats to your family. At this point, authorities consider the activity to be extortion. Between January 2017 and July 2018, there were 107 reports of Costa Rica extortion, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
According to a spokesman for the OIJ, these types of loans come from people “with no formal connections to financial institutions”, might even be clever people using their own savings to make huge profits off their fellow citizens.
Daniel Calderon, head of Costa Rica’s security forces, explained that extortion has increasingly been linked to other illicit activities – such as drug trafficking — which produces lots of cash which can then be loaned at obscene interest rates. It is believed that loan sharking originated in Latin America in Colombia, and many of these businesses in Costa Rica are run by Colombians.
The Attorney General’s Office reports that cells from the infamous Sinaloa Cartel, and even Iranian groups, have now added loan sharking to their menus of services. It seems that what was once only a supplementary way for criminal groups to diversify their illicit income, has turned into a fully-developed major concern for authorities, who are having trouble putting a stop to both loansharking and drug trafficking activities.
About the Author :
Carol Blair Vaughn has written for Inside Costa Rica, The Costa Rica Star, as well as El
Residente magazine. She grew up in Latin America, traveling with her father Jack Vaughn,
former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, and US Ambassador to Panama
and Colombia. The Star published her book Crazy Jungle Love: Murder, Madness, Money & Monkeys
in 2017, and it is now available for purchase on Amazon as both a paperback and an
ebook.



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