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MIDIRE.AR ·  ECONOMICS AND PERSONAL FINANCE

Debt Concerns

Claims grow over credit card overdraft and financial harassment by fintechs

One in four Argentine debtors can no longer pay what they asked for. While the arrears multiplied almost five times in 18 months, complaints of harassment by collectors tripled. X-ray of a silent crisis and the rights that protect users against financial harassment.

🕒 Approximate reading time: 9 minutes

📅 Updated as of August 11, 2026

A snowball that doesn't stop growing

In the Argentina of 2026, a new social profile has been consolidated in the Central Bank's statistics: the indebted citizen. It is not a marginal or transitory phenomenon. According to the Monthly Monitor of Credit to Families, prepared by the Faculty of Business Sciences of the Universidad Austral together with the consulting firm ECO GO, one in four debtors in the country today has some degree of default, and that percentage rises to 31% when the credit comes from a fintech or a non-financial provider.

The overdraft of the credit card – that habit of paying the minimum month by month to sustain expenses that inflation no longer liquefies as it used to – has become a trap for millions of middle- and lower-middle-class families. Prepaid health insurance, private schools, vacations and daily consumption that were previously financed with fixed installments today have become balances that grow on their own, month after month, pushed by rates that far exceed inflation.

But the delinquency crisis has, in addition to its visible face in the numbers, a hidden face: the systematic harassment suffered by thousands of debtors by collection agencies, law firms and fintech applications that bought or manage their unpaid debts. Calls at all hours, messages to relatives and bosses, and even mock judicial notifications that never existed.

The deterioration in the payment capacity of Argentine households is not a perception: it is documented month by month in the BCRA's Debtors Center. The report by Universidad Austral and ECO GO, which accesses this database, shows a sustained collapse for 20 consecutive months.

In December 2024, the total default on credit to individuals represented only 3.6% of the amount granted. A year later, in December 2025, it had already climbed to 12.6%. And in June 2026, the latest data available, it reached 17.5%: almost one out of every six pesos lent in the country is now in an irregular situation. In just 18 months, the indicator multiplied by 4.9.

Source: Monthly Monitor of Credit to Families, Universidad Austral and ECO GO, based on data from the BCRA's Central Debtors Center (June 2026).

The gap between banks and fintech is one of the most eloquent pieces of data in the report: non-financial credit providers – including virtual wallets, non-bank cards and consumer finance – account for only 14.1% of the total credit granted to individuals, but they account for a delinquency rate of 31%, more than double that of the traditional financial system.

The phenomenon is not even throughout the country. La Rioja leads the ranking of non-performing loans by amount with 24.5%, followed by San Luis (22.6%) and Santa Cruz (22.2%). At the other extreme, La Pampa (9.1%) and CABA (11.9%) show the lowest levels. A fact that caught the attention of the authors of the report: three out of four new defaulters identified between 2024 and 2026 already had loans two years ago and had been paying normally. They are not people who got into too much debt: they are people who stopped being able to pay what they already owed.

Behind each number of arrears there is a person who, in addition to not being able to pay, in many cases begins to receive calls at any time, WhatsApp messages with a threatening tone and, most seriously, communications to relatives, co-workers or neighbors informing them about the debt of others.

Official data from the Directorate for the Defense of Consumer Rights of the province of Buenos Aires reflect the magnitude of the phenomenon. Claims for 'abusive practices', under the sub-ground 'harassment', went from 393 cases in 2024 to 1,064 in 2025. And between January 1 and May 31, 2026, 1,237 complaints had already accumulated: more than in the whole of the previous year, in just five months.

Ariel Aguilar, Buenos Aires' Undersecretary of Commercial Development and Investment Promotion and head of that agency, described the pattern that is repeated in most of the files: repeated calls during business and non-business hours – including weekends – WhatsApp and email messages, and harassment directed not only at the debtor but also at family members.  co-workers and neighbors, to whom personal and sensitive data are disclosed.

The cases surveyed correspond mostly to collection agencies and law firms that bought portfolios of unpaid loans from banks and financial institutions, both traditional and non-traditional. According to data from the Center for City Studies (CEC), the peak in debt sales to the secondary market coincided with the strong volatility of interest rates and the fall in real income recorded between the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.

In the case of informal or unbanked workers, the battlefront is transferred to fintech applications such as Mercado Pago, Naranja X or Ualá. Many users discover, when it is too late, that the collection system can contact their personal contacts: the authorization to do so is usually in the Terms and Conditions that are accepted when installing the application, without the user noticing that clause.

Not all collection management is illegal: claiming a debt is a creditor's right. The problem arises when this management crosses limits that the Consumer Protection Law and the Civil and Commercial Code clearly establish. These are the most denounced practices and their legal status:

Argentine law does not exempt anyone from paying what they owe, but it does strictly regulate how that debt can be claimed. These are the central rules that protect financial users against harassment:

•     Law 24.240 on Consumer Protection, Article 8 bis — Guarantees dignified treatment and expressly prohibits extrajudicial collection from pretending to be judicial.

•     Law 24.240, Article 52 bis — Enables punitive damages: if a non-existent judicial process was simulated, the employer was contacted or a documentable moral damage was generated, a judge may impose a civil fine in favor of the consumer.

•     Civil and Commercial Code, Article 770 — Declares null and void the capitalization of interest (anatocism) before six months of arrears, a frequent practice in fintechs.

•     Communication 'A' 7146 of the BCRA — Subject to the supervision of the Central Bank and the Financial Services User Protection Regime (PUSF), with a period of 20 business days to respond to claims.

At the rate level, the Central Bank itself sets periodic ceilings for financing with cards issued by non-banking entities: through Communication 'B' 13096/2025, it established at 72.56% the reference rate for personal loans without real collateral, applicable from the January 2026 billing cycle and used as a ceiling for the cost of card revolving. Added to this are the Total Financial Cost (TFC), debt balance insurance and VAT, which in practice raise the real cost of financing the minimum payment well above that nominal figure.

Claiming against an abusive collection does not erase the debt: they are two different issues. What is required is that the collection process be carried out within the law, without intimidation or simulation of non-existent judicial instances. Consumer protection specialists recommend the following steps:

•     Document everything: screenshots of messages, record of times and number of calls, and names of people contacted without authorization.

•     File the complaint at the Consumer Protection Platform (argentina.gob.ar) or at the provincial address corresponding to the complainant's domicile.

•     If the creditor is a bank or a regulated fintech, add the claim on the Central Bank's Financial Users platform, which generates direct regulatory pressure on the entity.

•     Evaluate, with legal advice, the possibility of claiming the punitive damages provided for in article 52 bis if there was simulation of judicial proceedings, contact with the employer or documentable moral damage.

•     Check if there was capitalization of interest before the six months of arrears: this practice is null and void according to Article 770 of the Civil and Commercial Code and can be challenged.

While the arrears multiply, no political force has yet managed to clearly interpret this new social subject that is the indebted Argentine. It is, to a large extent, the same electorate that supported the austerity of Javier Milei's government and that today lives with the deterioration of its own standard of living, without any leader offering a diagnosis or a concrete answer to the problem of over-indebtedness.

In Córdoba, the claim even reached the unions: the Union of Educators of the Province of Córdoba (UEPC) and public employee unions requested refinancing lines from the provincial bank Bancor to stop the automatic debits that liquefied the salary accounts of its members. It is a sign that the phenomenon no longer only affects the informal sectors, but also registered workers with fixed incomes.

The national government, for its part, maintains that the over-indebtedness of families is 'a problem between private companies'. Meanwhile, a bill to reform the Central Bank's Organic Charter is advancing that would cut some of its powers of intervention on the allocation of credit, at a time when delinquencies accumulate 20 consecutive months of growth.

The combination of high financing rates, revenues that do not keep pace with accumulated inflation, and a collection industry that in many cases operates outside the law creates a picture that the researchers themselves describe as a 'social drama' rather than a simple financial fact. The challenge, for the political system and for the control bodies, is twofold: to contain the growth of delinquencies without leaving credit unprotected, and at the same time to ensure that claiming a debt does not become a form of daily violence against those who can no longer pay it.

Verified images available on Wikimedia Commons to accompany the publication (use under Creative Commons license, with attribution):

🖼️ Headquarters of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic, San Nicolás, CABA (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

❓ Is it legal for a fintech to call my boss or a family member to claim a debt from me?

No. Contacting the employer, relatives or neighbors to inform them about a personal debt violates Article 8 bis of Law 24,240 on Consumer Defense, which guarantees dignified treatment. It is an abusive practice that can be reported to the Consumer Defense and, if the creditor is a regulated entity, also to the BCRA.

❓ Can I claim compensation if I was harassed for a debt?

Yes. Article 52 bis of Law 24,240 enables punitive damages: if a non-existent judicial process was simulated, the employer was contacted or a documentable moral damage was generated, a judge can impose a civil fine in favor of the consumer.

❓ Does reporting a collector's harassment erase or cancel the debt?

No. They are two independent issues: the complaint for harassment seeks that the collection process respects the law, while the debt itself remains in force and must be negotiated or refinanced separately with the creditor.

❓ Where is harassment from a collection agency reported in Argentina?

It can be started online at argentina.gob.ar or at the Consumer Protection Directorate of each province. If the creditor is a bank or a regulated fintech, it is advisable to add the claim on the Financial Users platform of the Central Bank (BCRA), which has a period of 20 business days to respond.

❓ Why is delinquency higher in fintechs than in banks?

According to the report by Universidad Austral and ECO GO, the irregularity of non-bank credit reached 31% in June 2026, more than double the 15.2% of the traditional financial system. Specialists associate it with a profile of users with less access to bank credit, higher rates and less repayment capacity in the face of the fall in real income.

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Card overdraft and fintech harassment: delinquency grows in Argentina

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The arrears multiplied by 5 in 18 months and complaints of harassment by collectors tripled. Data, legal framework and how to claim in Argentina.

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