When Digital Usury Destroys Our Ethics and Dinner Tables

Have you ever seen a friend or relative whose Instagram posts always look prosperous—aesthetic cafes, branded goods, or modest holidays—yet behind the screen, they are trembling at debt notifications? This phenomenon is real. We are in a terrifying ‘survival mode’, where the economy appears to be moving visually, but at the household level, many are liquidating savings or cutting back on nutrition just to get by.

Did you know? Data shows that around 1.1 million of our middle-class citizens have ‘fallen in caste’ to become a vulnerable group in just the past year. Many of them were pushed to take shortcuts through the applications in their hands: online loans (pinjol) and paylater services. Initially seen as liquidity saviours, they have slowly turned into predators that destroy the family order.

A Deadly Trap Behind the ‘Agree’ Click

Why are these seemingly ‘helpful’ applications so destructive? The problem is not just about borrowing money, but the exploitative usury system that works automatically. Imagine, the average instalment interest rate reaches 2.95% per month with cumulative late fees of around 5%. For a family with stagnant income while food prices soar, these figures are a ‘black hole’ impossible to close.

However, the deepest wound is not just about money. The humanitarian issue arises when collection ethics are brutally violated. Data from the Financial Services Authority (OJK) through the Consumer Protection Portal Application (APPK) recorded 11,195 complaints, with spending related to financial technology dominating at 12.01%. We often hear tragic stories of intimidation, threats, and the exposure of customers’ personal disgrace to all contacts on their phones. From a universal ethical perspective, maintaining human dignity while chasing debt interest is a serious moral crime.

Digital Usury and the Loss of Hope

This dependence on usurious debt creates a phenomenon of the ‘working poor’: people who work full-time yet live in chronic economic anxiety. Funds that should be for children’s education or future investments are instead drained to pay ‘ghost fees’ and compound interest. In principle, wealth should not only circulate among large capital owners while the productive masses are increasingly squeezed.

This system often only provides unilateral benefits to service providers and exploits the vulnerability of conventional consumers. Without intervention, Indonesia’s middle class, which is the engine of the national economy, will continue to deteriorate.

Building a Humane Safety Net

So, what is the solution? We need fairer and more transparent alternatives. A concrete step that can be taken is switching to ‘Sharia Paylater’ schemes or financing that uses a bailout concept without usurious interest, where profit is derived from a fixed and clear service fee (ujrah) from the outset.

The government must also be present through instruments that strengthen Productive Zakat and Waqf. This enormous potential can become a real social safety net to free those entangled in debt (gharimin) and provide basic facilities such as housing or affordable healthcare.

Returning to a just economic system is not just about fulfilling religious commands, but about restoring the dignity of Indonesian families. It is time we realise that prosperity will never be born from a system that extracts the sweat of people struggling to survive. We need an economy that gives its people a future, not just a false lifestyle on a phone screen.