Personal Financing – Unauthorised Loan Scam

On 4 September 2026 the Central Bank of Ireland published a warning notice about a firm trading as "Personal Financing". The Central Bank's finding is one sentence long and it is the whole point of this page: "Personal Financing is not authorised to provide retail credit services in Ireland." The notice lists the contact details the firm was using — the website personalfinancing.co.uk, the email address [email protected], a London landline beginning 0208, and a Telegram account at t.me/LoanFinance12 — and the Central Bank publishes the name under section 53 of the Central Bank (Supervision and Enforcement) Act 2013. Lending money to consumers in Ireland is a regulated activity: a retail credit firm needs Central Bank authorisation to do it, and authorised firms appear on the public register at registers.centralbank.ie. Personal Financing does not have that authorisation. That is a statement about the firm's legal standing, not a description of what happens to any particular borrower, and this page keeps the two apart. What the warning does tell you with certainty is what you lose by dealing with it. If you borrow from a firm that is not authorised here, you are outside the Consumer Protection Code, outside the Central Bank's complaints machinery, and outside the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, who can only look at complaints about regulated providers. There is no route back. Two features of the listed contact details are worth an Irish reader's attention on their own: a lender soliciting Irish borrowers from a .co.uk domain with a London phone number is not an Irish regulated lender, and no authorised Irish lender conducts a loan application over Telegram — an encrypted messaging app leaves you with no regulated firm, no paper trail and no complaint route.

• •People who have been refused credit by a bank or credit union and are searching online for a lender who will say yes
• •Borrowers with a poor or thin credit record, for whom "no credit check" is the phrase that stops the scroll
• •Households under acute short-term pressure — arrears, a car repair, a bill with a deadline
• •People who search for loans on a phone and take the first sponsored result without reading the domain
• •Recent arrivals to Ireland who do not yet know that Irish lenders must be on a Central Bank register, or what a credit union is
• •Anyone approached through Telegram, WhatsApp or a social media reply offering fast finance
• •Self-employed people whose income is hard to document for a mainstream lender

• •Someone looking for credit has usually already been turned down somewhere, so an approval feels like relief rather than a red flag
• •Financial pressure has a deadline attached, and a deadline is the enemy of the twenty minutes it takes to check a register
• •Almost nobody knows that registers.centralbank.ie exists, or that every legitimate Irish lender is on it
• •A .co.uk website reads as "British", and British reads as respectable — very few Irish readers register that it also means "not authorised here"
• •A professional-looking website costs very little to build and proves nothing about who is behind it
• •Telegram feels modern and efficient rather than evasive, and a chat thread can be deleted from both ends
• •Loan applications legitimately ask for bank details, payslips, PPS numbers and ID — so the same requests from an unauthorised firm do not stand out
• •Shame keeps people quiet. Someone in financial difficulty is less likely to ring a family member for a second opinion