Harmoney faces charges

The Commerce Commission has filed six Fair Trading Act charges relating to 27 versions of a pre-approval letter sent to 500,000 New Zealanders between October 2014 and April 2015.

Each letter carried a similar message and the same representations, which the Commerce Commissions says were misleading.

The Commission alleges that the letters misled recipients by representing that they had been pre-approved to borrow money from Harmoney. The letters stated that in order to find out how much money the recipient had been approved for, they needed to visit Harmoney’s website.

In fact, recipients of the letter had to go through the normal application process of lodging a loan request and passing the approval process. Only at that point would their loan request be presented to potential lenders via Harmoney’s platform.

Harmoney has co-operated with the Commission’s investigation and has indicated that it intends to plead guilty to the charges.