By Didi Kirsten Tatlow

New York Times

BEIJING >> Women in China are sending naked photographs of themselves holding their ID cards to peer-to-peer lenders as collateral, Chinese state media have reported, in a trend that may involve thousands of people.

The phenomenon, which the Beijing Youth Daily said was taking place on a popular online peer-to-peer lender called Jiedaibao, is provoking alarm and sympathy on social media. It has also led to calls for women to protect themselves from predators who are reportedly blackmailing them with the nude photographs, sometimes demanding sexual services when the women cannot repay at interest rates that can be as high as 30 percent a week.

A call seeking comment to Jiedaibao, a leading company in China’s flourishing peer-to-peer lending market, was not answered late on Wednesday in Beijing.

Beijing Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League, said the practice was an “open secret.”

“An investigation by Beijing Youth Daily shows that in some money lending groups, female university students’ ‘naked holding’ has already become an open secret,” it wrote, referring to the practice of women photographing themselves naked holding their ID card as a guarantee of repayment.

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, a person called Beijing Ninth Uncle said he was gathering evidence that women from many different walks of life, including farmers and even a former employee of Jiedaibao, as well as university students, were falling afoul of the lenders’ demands.

“With ‘naked holding’ they can get two to five times the amount of money, but when they can’t repay some have been threatened with publishing the photographs, and some lenders are even demanding the female students provide sexual services,” Beijing Youth Daily wrote.

It described the case of a university student from Jiangsu province in central China, whom it gave the pseudonym of Lin Xiao. Her troubles began, it said, when she borrowed 500 renminbi, about $75, from a lender in February to open an online store. At 30 percent interest on the one-week loan, she quickly needed more money to repay the debt, eventually borrowing about 120,000 renminbi from 15 people, a sum that soon ballooned into 250,000 renminbi (about $38,000) at the high interest rate.

She remembered another borrower saying, “If you send a nude picture to the boss, he will lend you even more.” So the woman supplied a nude photograph of herself in exchange for a larger loan to try to escape her debt, including personal information such as contact numbers and addresses for family members. When she could not repay, the lender threatened to show the photographs to her family and friends, the newspaper reported.

As the circle of debt widened, so did the distribution of the naked photographs, until they were in the hands of three online lenders, Beijing Youth Daily reported. At that point she told her family and, with their help, began to clear the debt. “But I still owe about 60,000 renminbi,” she said.

The story could not be independently verified.

“High interest, ‘naked holding’ and so on are the private actions of users; this company cannot interfere,” Beijing Youth Daily quoted Jiedaibao as saying in response to the reports of such behavior among users. “Risks are the borrowers’ responsibility,” it said.

© 2016 The New York Times Company